Effect of shopper characteristics in choice of a retail format in food and grocery retailing in India

Store format selection has also been seen in the context of the risk reduction strategies of the shoppers. Food and grocery is the most promising area for setting up retail business in India. An understanding of shopper retail format choice behaviour will enable retailers to segment their market and target specific consumer groups with strategies premeditated to meet their retail needs. The purpose of this paper is to make a detailed study on the importance of shoppers’ demographic, geographic and psychographic dimensions in terms of retail format selection in the fast growing Indian food and grocery retailing. Descriptive research design is adopted applying mall intercept survey method using structured questionnaire for data collection. Both descriptive and inferential statistical tools are used to analyze the data collected from 580 food and grocery retail customers from neighborhood kirana stores and supermarkets in Secunderabad and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh in India. The findings suggest that shoppers’ age, gender, occupation, education, monthly household income, family size and distance travelled to store have significant association with retail format choice decisions. The choice decisions vary among shoppers’ demographic attributes. The findings from shoppers’ psychographic dimensions like values, lifestyle factors and shopper activities resulted in understanding the food and grocery retail consumer's behaviour for selection of a retail format. The study has practical implications for food and grocery retailers for better understanding the shopper behaviour in the context of changing consumer demographic and psychographic characteristics in an emerging Indian retail market. The findings may help the retailers to segment and target the food and grocery retail consumers and, as a consequence, to undertake more effective retail marketing strategies for competitive advantage.