CRITICAL REVIEW

Critical Review



Critical Review

Executive Summary

The article, “Consumer perceptions toward retail attributes of value retailers: functions of gender and repatronage intention”, focus on the consumers from the value retail sector. The researchers seek to examine the perceived retail attributes across groups of consumers who fall under the category of gender and re-patronage intention. These groups pertain to three different formats of retail stores. These formats are supercenter, category killers and warehouse clubs. In addition, the researchers used a multivariate profile analysis. The analysis resulted in the formation of profiles of four consumer groups. These profiles include female high-repatronage, female low-repatronage, male high-repatronage, and male low-repatronage. Moreover, the researchers studied these profiles on six subsets of retail features.

These subsets are price, assortment, convenience, post-transaction, in-store information availability, and store environment. The three tests of profile analysis, which are parallelism, flatness, and overall difference among consumer groups indicated that four consumer groups represented parallelism. However, the test showed deviation from flatness. On the other hand, the research showed that there were differences across the four consumer groups for supercenters and warehouse clubs. However, there were no differences for category killers. Moreover, the findings derived from the research suggest that female consumers, demonstrated to have significant differences with respect to their perceived retail attributes. This was between high- and low-repatronage groups. On the contrary, male consumers showed opposite results to that of female consumers. In the end, there were significant implications for the managers derived from the findings. These implications include marketing strategies for the two genders, which could help in attracting gender-specific consumers. Findings suggest that it is essential for retailers to have marketing strategies, which could help in encouraging male shoppers. Results indicate that male shoppers mostly push for time while shopping. Therefore, reducing their decision-making time would be one of the main strategies.

Key Points of the Literature Review

The literature review talks about the changing consumers' needs and their shift toward value stores. The researchers also talk about the development and growth of retailers such as discount stores, category killers, off-price discounters, and warehouse clubs due to the recent shift of consumers. This is a key point, which is significant for the researchers because the entire research is based on this fact.

Moreover, the researchers also discuss patronage behaviour of consumers, and how retail attributes influence it. The researchers also incorported relavant information from past studies pertaining attributes such as convenience, low price, environment etc. With respect to this, the researchers also discusses the significance of these attributes.

As the current study also talks about distinct geneder and patronage behaviour, the researchers also discuss the differences between men and women in their shopping behaviours.

Critique of the Literature Review

The research uses the following framework to determine the findings.

The framework indicates that there are 7 independent variables and 4 dependent variables. The effects of price, assortment, locational convenience, in-store convenience, post-transaction, in-store information and store image on FLR, FHR, MLR, and MHR.

There has been a significant change in the retail ...