Consumer versus Retailer Perceptions of Store Positioning in the Uk Fashion Sector

Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this working paper are the responsibility of the author alone. Introduction It has been highlighted that market positioning-based on a combination of price and product differentiation-can provide an important competitive advantage for commercial organisations (e.g. Day and Wensley, 1988). This is especially so within retailing, where effective positioning can lead to a variety of trading benefits (see Ellis and Kelly, 1992). It is not surprising, therefore, that researchers have striven consistently to provide an improved has tended to concentrate on customer perceptions in isolation, despite the fact that consumers do not necessarily perceive a retail store's marketing communications in the way the strategy of the organisation had intended (Schiffman and Kanuk, 1994). This suggests that retailer perceptions of their own market position can be 'out of step' with those of existing (and potential) customers. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore, within the context of menswear fashion retailing: (a) the dimensions of store image important to the customer; and (b) the degree of congruence between retailer and customer perceptions of store image. In so doing, the paper raises important conceptual, strategic and management implications. The main elements of store image and positioning within the literature are considered in the first section of the paper. The second section then describes recent research undertaken on menswear fashion retailing within Glasgow, in which a sample of 340 respondents were interviewed to elicit the components of store image which they felt influenced where they chose to shop. In the third section of the paper, an exploratory attempt is made to evaluate these dimensions using Fishbein and Ajzen's 'Theory of Reasoned Action' as a framework for analysis, to assess consumer perceptions of individual retailer store images. In the final section, these findings are compared with those of retailers perceptions of themselves, derived through comparable interviews with store management and staff. In Martineau's (1958) paper, it was suggested that retail outlets had, so far as customers were concerned, a 'personality' composed of functional and psychological attributes. Martineau argued that retail organisations projecting an image close to the targeted customer's self image would, as a consequence, increase loyalty towards the store. This assertion was later extended by Arons (1961), who proposed that there is a connection between a store which is 'agreeable' from the customer point of view, and the number of times they will visit the store within a …