Essay On Consumer Behaviour

1 Introduction

Recently, there has been a growing concern about retailing consumption in the fashion sector. According to the dictionary, consumption means the utilization of economic goods in the satisfaction of wants or in the process of production resulting chiefly in their destruction, deterioration, or transformation. So, who make the consumption? Who make the spending? It is obvious that consumption connects closely to consumer behavior. While a variety of definitions of the term have been discussed, this paper will use the definition suggested by Solomon (2009). Consumer behavior can be defined as the ways people interact with the marketing system, it concerns the products and services they purchase and use, and the ways these meet with their lives. So far, however, there has been some discussions about factors which affect consumer behavior such as age, gender, income and social class, but little on methods to stimulate consumption.

This essay will discuss the ways to stimulate consumption if fashion retailing, considering shopping motivations of customers and special offers provided by retailers as the main two parts. It will begin by analyzing

Shopping for clothes directly reaches people’s appearance, which has become a way of communicating and enhancing personality traits, charm, and social roles (Anspach, 1967). Tatzel (1982) has divided customers into four groups depending on whether they are skilled or motivated or not, these are fashion-conscious consumers, independent consumers, anxious consumers and apathetic consumers. Fashion-conscious consumers is shopping for leisure, they are more tend to go traditional department stores rather than online stores or discount stores. Compared with fashion-conscious consumers, independent consumers is ‘economic’ shoppers who shop more