A study of consumers’ pre-purchase evaluation of apparel products in Ethiopia

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore pre-purchase apparel evaluation cues and examine the effect of demographic variables empirically in the context of a developing country. The initiation for the study was driven by the absence of such prior research and supplemented by the big market opportunity for clothing products in the country under investigation.Design/methodology/approachA self-administered online survey was used for data collection. Demographic questions, 23 apparel measurement items composed of 17 product-based and 6 sustainability-based items, and an open-ended question were included in the questionnaire. Factor analysis was used for dimension reduction and one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) for hypotheses testing.FindingsGarment fit, design features, colour, fabric type and seasonality are the five important characteristics most Ethiopian consumers consider while buying apparel products. Factor analysis resulted in five important factors used for pre-purchase apparel evaluation amongst which the design and extrinsic cue is found to be the most important. Environmental factors in the apparel industry got higher emphasis than social factors. While age and educational background made differences in apparel evaluation, gender did not show a significant difference.Originality/valueThe paper provides a founding insight in exploring apparel evaluation cues by considering product- and sustainability-based cues in a developing country context. It also examines the effect of three demographic variables which are rarely studied in such combination.

Analysis of Online Evaluation of Fashion Boutique Customers

“…Fashion boutiques are essentially imitations of established patterns, meeting the need for social adaptation, and guiding people along a path that provides a universal rule that turns individual behavior into a model, but fashion boutiques also meet the need for differentiation and individuality [15]. Such changes give fashion a differentiation that can be made over time and in terms of class, with higher-class clothing deliberately differentiated from lower-class clothing, and the higher class discarding the boutique when the lower class begins to imitate it [17,18].…”

Prioritizing customer requirements for men’s denim jeans through factor analysis and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

“…Studies examining differences in the importance of evaluation criteria with the demographic characteristics of consumers consider a variety of products such as cars, food and clothing (Henry, 2002;Williams, 2002), clothing products in general (Bizuneh et al, 2021;Rahman and Koszewska, 2020) or specific clothing products such as denim jeans (Rahman, 2011). The studies related to denim jeans that examined differences in the importance of evaluation criteria across demographic factors are limited.…”

“…However, in such production strategy, the clothes are assumed to meet the expectations of the consumers in general, while individual customer requirements (CRs) cannot be satisfied fully which results in a gap between what the consumers really want and what manufacturers think the consumers want (Rayman et al, 2011). As a result, the question "Which clothing characteristics are favoured by customers in general (Bizuneh et al, 2021) or in a certain specific garment (Abreu et al, 2021)?" becomes a vital topic of research to identify the clothing evaluation criteria used by most consumers.…”

“…In Africa, where there is high consumption of imported ready-made clothes, studies identifying CRs for ready-made clothes, in general, are limited (Bizuneh et al, 2021;Herbst and Burger, 2002). The existing scarce studies also focus on female consumers (De Klerk and Lubbe, 2008;Hugo and Van Aardt, 2012;Oladele and Ogundipe, 2017).…”

“…The first research question was addressed by reviewing the literature to extract the common denim jeans attributes, analyzing customer complaints, and content analysis of additional attributes listed by the participants after rating the attributes from the literature and customer complaints. The customer ratings on the attributes extracted from literature and customer complaints were analyzed by factor analysis (Inder et al, 2021), and the effect of demographic factors on the resulting primary evaluation criteria was examined by analysis of variance (ANOVA) (Bizuneh et al, 2021) to address the second research question. Finally, the ranking was performed using fuzzy AHP (Gupta et al, 2023) by aggregating the selected CRs from literature, customer complaints and content analysis.…”