Fashion store personality: Scale development and relation to self-congruity theory

Abstract

Like consumers buy luxury fashion brands to express or enhance their self-image, so can they be expected to patronize fashion stores with a personality positioning that matches their self-concept. This paper first presents a store personality scale development, tailor-made for fashion retailing, in order to account for the phenomenon of “concept-scale interaction”. Fifty-one individual interviews applying repertory grid analysis result in a preliminary list of humanlike adjectives that are attributable to fashion stores. A subsequent consumer survey (n = 481) leads to the identification of five underlying fashion store personality (FSP) dimensions: “chaos”, “innovativeness”, “sophistication”, “agreeableness”, and “conspicuousness”. In the second part of this study, the association between FSP and the consumers’ personality is visualized in a multidimensional scaling analysis. Finally, the findings of a stepwise multiple discriminant analysis indicate that chaos and sophistication are the two FSP dimensions that consumers mind most when choosing a fashion store to patronize.