Examining Women's Purchase Pattern of Casual Footwear in Accordance with their Attitudes and Interests

Purpose: The present study examines the association between the choices of casual footwear attributes of women in accordance with their behavioral pattern.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Data was collected from 2365 women through a questionnaire that comprised of two sections. The first section comprised of 50 AIO statements based on which the respondents were profiled according to their behavioural patterns. The second section comprised of selected footwear and store attributes. The consumers were profiled into eleven clusters using factor analysis. The regression scores were used to assign the respondents to the respective components that were extracted through factor analysis. Reliability Test and KMO Test were conducted to check the reliability and adequacy of the sample size. Further, only those variables that qualified the collinearity test were alone subject to regression analysis. Through ANOVA test, it was observed that significant differences existed among the consumers within the clusters. Therefore, the AIO statements were considered as independent variables that were regressed against ten selected footwear attributes

Findings: The Results indicated that consumers with different behaviors had varied preferences towards footwear attributes.

Practical Implications: The results of the study indicate that the manufacturers in the footwear sector should revisit their existing strategies and target the consumers on the basis of their behavior as the proliferation of the unorganized sector is very high in this sector.

Original Value: There are innumerable literatures that focus on trade policies followed in the footwear market in international countries, treatment of workers in the footwear industry, therapeutic use of footwear, supply chain patterns etc., but hardly any significant study that explores the consumers' behaviour and their association towards their footwear preferences has been conducted. Behavioral segmentation has been used in many other products like apparels, insurance, real estate etc., but not in the footwear sector. The present study is an attempt to fill this gap.