Luxury intimate apparel consumption in Ho Chi Minh City : Factors affecting attitude and purchase intention
Abstract
Based on a strong retail environment and growing customer awareness to
fashion and trends, Vietnamese apparel market was expected to boom in 2010s.
Besides the positive economic outlook, the young population and high-rated
urbanization and rise in living standard brings a huge potential to this industry. For
the last five years, Vietnam has observed the coming of many fashion brands and its
niche concern – lingerie and the market is seriously successful however challenging
for everyone.
Starting from small base, designer lingerie is expected to grow annually since
shoppers, especially women, begin to move from function to fashion. With better
income, they are ready to pay for more high-quality as well as designer products.
This niche market also meets some problems, nevertheless. It is needless to talk about
the stressful competition between domestic and foreign brands. The counterfeit
underwear is widely spread, the lack of information or comprehension about lingerie
benefits to health all add to challenges in Vietnam market. Hence, this study was
conducted in order to figure out the overall thinking and the critical elements
impacting female’s purchase intention towards lingerie in high-end section.
In the literature review, proposed models would be listed with several related
theories and journals in order to aim to the purposes of this research. Eventually, the
conceptual model by Bopeng Z. and Jung-Hwan K. (2012) is adopted and developed
for this study. The research also finds out how these factors affect to customer’s
attitude and purchase intention and the relationships if there is any between them.
Then, Quantitative approach was applied in this study with 301 reliable
responses collected to analyze with SPSS and AMOS software. To be more detailed,
the questionnaire where questions about evaluations of customers toward five
predicted factors will be well established to identify the most essential factors among
them. The result showed that only two over five factors have a positive relationshipxi
with customers’ attitude toward designer lingerie purchase intention. Additionally,
attitudes also have positive impact on intention of luxury designer innerwear
purchase. Although some limitations of this study were defined, this study also came
up with practical implications as well as recommendations to have a fundamental
knowledge in undergarment industry.