A Study to Examine Whether Crowding Affects the Customers of Exclusive Brand Outlets (Ebo's)

Abstract

 Exclusive brand outlets is been a top agenda for the retailers and
brand marketers. Therefore, the promotional efforts aiming to
estimate EBOs traffic in the store is now a great concern for setting
the strategy. Importantly, such aggressive sales promotion strategics
results into higher customer traffic at retail outlets which affect the
store image. Retail managers are concerned about retail crowding
now than ever because of increasing footfalls with increasing
population. Store crowding is a concept that generates many
associations in consumers' mind, often very different ones.Therefore,
the purpose of the study is to investigate the effect of crowding on
customers EBOs. The usable sample of 290 customers were
analysed for testing the hypotheses. The McNemar test was used to
analyze pre-test and post-test results. it was found that atmospheric
cues like crowding affects positive store image. It is clear from this
study that perception of consumers do change towards crowding
even in EBO's during crowded situations in such stores like in EOSS.
Both male and female have similar feeling towards crowding. It is
interesting to note from this study that while consumers feel
crowded during EOSS in EBO they try to cope with such feeling and
try to ignore the fellow crowd. It would be interesting to find out the
reasons for that.The insights help to understand the shopping
experience in the retail outlets. Research in other cities with other
customers may be conducted to examine the validity and reliability
of the identified store attributes.