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ISSN 0265 9778
Grete Birtwistle is a Lecturer and Ian Clarke is a Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, Paul Freathy is a Senior Lecturer, Institute for Retail Studies, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA.
Working Paper 9602 CONSUMER VERSUS RETAILER PERCEPTIONS OF STORE POSITIONING IN THE UK FASHION SECTOR Grete Birtwistle, Ian Clarke and Paul Freathy
Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this working paper are the responsibility of the author alone.
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© Institute for Retail Studies. All rights reserved.
2 'O wad some Pow 'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!’*
Introduction
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For reasons of confidentiality, these are represented using the following synonyms: ‘The Tailor’, ‘The Gallant Weaver’, ‘Tam o’Shanter’, ‘Wandering Willie’ and ‘Dainty Davie’. Individual questionnaires were designed for each of the retail companies surveyed, based on Schiffman and Kanuk’s (1994) interpretation of the model. Eight attributes of store image, elicited by the initial survey (outlined in Birtwistle and Siddiqui, 1995) as the most significant factors to respondents when they chose where to shop, were used for the first section of the equation (see Table 2). These attributes were also used for measuring respondent evaluation of store image. For the subjective norm, three groups of people who might influence where the individual chooses to shop were deemed to be family, friends and colleagues. The questions used to evaluate attributes on particular stores and questions relating to social influences utilised bipolar scales (from +3 to -3). The remaining questions used a uni-polar scale (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980). Questions were included to define the demographic profile of respondents as well as indicating which stores - of the five selected - had been patronised in the last six …show more content…
Table 9 illustrates this point with results from two of the companies, Wandering Willie and Dainty Davie. Overall, managers had an image perception which was more remote from the customer perceptions of store image, as well as that of their staff. But when employees were asked how likely it would be that they would purchase menswear clothing from the store (assuming that they did not work there), answers were virtually the same as for regular customers. This measure could potentially represent a surrogate indicator for senior management of customer image of their own store. In fact, some retailers already use the propensity of staff to order from new season ranges as a method of indicating likely best