Window display and customers' entry decisions
Abstract
Nowadays, the importance of fashion in today’s society is greatly
appreciated. The fact that the fashion market becomes more and more developed
leads clothing retailers to utilize numerous strategies to attract both potential and
current customers. Noticeably, besides other important strategies, retailers now also
focus on visual merchandising to differentiate from others. Of the elements of visual
merchandising, the author concentrates on window display since firsly according to
the statistics, the consumers in Ho Chi Minh City prefer new products to be
introduced through items that are displayed at the point of sales - window display is
one of those points, and secondly in foreign countries, there are many theories and
research papers which defined the relationship between window display and customer
entry decisions. Thus, this research was conducted with the purpose of finding out the
role of window displays, specifically types of information acquired from them in
customers’ entry decisions.
The research was conducted from December 2013 to April 2014 in
Ho Chi Minh City with the methodology of quantitative study. Questionnaires were
used to collect data from 291 randomly selected people with the age range from 18 to
30 years old. The data were analyzed by using SPSS program.
The result shows a positive influence level of window display in
customers’ decisions to enter a store. Three main information factors including
Fashion, Store Image and Product Fit make a significant contribution to the prediction
of Entry Decision. Especially, Fashion information is the strongest information that
affects customers’ entry decision.
Although there are limitations of this study, the results are proposed
with some practical implications and recommendations in order to help domestic
clothing retailers producers formulate better strategies and capture the domestic
fashion market