Dwindling retail market share in the developed countries direct attention to a critical appraisal of the potential in emerging markets. While store choice can be an outcome of several interdependent factors, understanding the impact of shoppers’ format perception on their decision process helps in analyzing the developing attitude of the Indian retail customers. As organized retail market in India still evolves with notable dominance in categories like apparel, the present paper aims at exploring the formative attitude of the Indian apparel shoppers with respect to the single and multi-brand store format options. Demographic profiles are found to influence format preferences. The survey reveals that the urban Indian middle class, with leisure-oriented shopping motive, desire multi-brand stores to satisfy their shop-and-fun needs. Time-constrained urban female population along with senior citizens prefer single brand formats to suit their objective-driven shopping needs. The articulation of the format perception of the Indian apparel shoppers not only aids the existing and prospective retailers in formulating sustainable formats, but also serves as a foundation for a deeper probe into the retail consumer behavior research domain specific to emerging markets.

The role of commercial retail formats and their effect on shoppers’ choice of shopping destination is critical to studies on retail format strategies. The shopper goes through the process of deciding “where to shop” and “how much to buy” with a greater concern for the differences across formats to those within similar formats (Fox et al., 2004).

A good format ensures footfall. It is the overall appearance and feel of a retailer that is different from fascia or just the external appearance of the retailer (Graeme Pietersz, 2011). An effective format results from the rightful mix of the retailer controlled variables like assortment, price, transactional convenience and the overall retail experience. With narrowing differences in the format composition, traditional grocery stores that emerged as supermarkets like Kroger, Albertson and Safeway are competing with mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart; and even with drug store formats like CVS and Walgreens, especially in the packaged goods sale. When different formats offering similar products coexist, studies on the shopper’s patronizing behavior, especially the varying format perception across demography draws special attention.

However, academic research on retail concentrated heavily on the more developed western retail markets, especially that of the US and Europe, due to the convenience of studying relatively organized structures and retail forms. In recent times, the rise of emerging economies and growing interest of international retailers to tap the potential of rising opportunities outside their own saturated domain (Goldman, 2001) have given prominence to studies on various aspects of retail in the new markets (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 2000). Taking the instance of India and China, the fastest growing consumer markets of the world saw the growth of modern retail as a result of liberalization of their respective trade policies over the last 20 years (Kim and Kincade, 2007). A focus on the Indian organized retail sector reveals the existence of quite a number of formats, especially in categories like apparel, grocery and footwear. The existing relaxations in the Indian FDI regulation, particularly for single brand stores, and the impending opening up of the multi-brand retail (The Telegraph, 2011) are attracting the best known international brands, adding to the competition. A classification of retailers into single and multi-brand stores seems justified for comparing their respective effectiveness in attracting shoppers in India. The single brand stores typically offer products of a single brand and are sized between 1,000 and 5,000 sq. ft in area (Knight, 2010). Some of the prominent single brand stores include Nike, Adidas, Gucci, Gautier, Zara and Levis along with their counterparts of Indian origin like Biba, Fab India, Gatha, Raymonds and Wills Lifestyle, to name a few. Multi-brand stores offer multiple brands in the form of departmental stores, hypermarkets, shopping malls sized between 1,000 and 20,000 sq. ft in area. The best known multi-brand stores include Shopper’s Stop, Lifestyle, Central, Pantaloon, Big Bazaar and Westside.

Marketing Management Journal, Format, Perception, Indian Apparel, Shoppers, Case of Single, Multi-Brand Stores.