Format Choice of Food and Grocery Retailers

Format choice is recognized as a cognitive process. Like any other purchasing decision format choice also is an information processing behavior. A store is chosen based on the confidence that the customer has regarding the store; about the nature and quality of product and service he will receive. In Indian scenario formats have been found to be influencing the choice of store as well as orientation of the shoppers (Sinha and Uniyal, 2005). This study seeks to analyze the various factors influencing decision making process of customers in choosing a store format. A full-profile* procedure was used for the Conjoint Analysis in this study. The exploratory study brought out five different formats that existed in the food and grocery sector. With this it also identified combinations of the seven parameters have given rise to some generic retail formats. It also helped identifying the important factor set which affects consumer format choice decisions. The findings also provide details useful for retailers in designing an efficient retail package to offer their customers. * Full-profile conjoint analysis has been a popular approach to measure attribute utilities. In the full-profile conjoint task, different product descriptions (or even different actual products) are developed and presented to the respondent for acceptability or preference evaluations. Each product profile is designed as part of a fractional factorial experimental design that evenly matches the occurrence of each attribute with all other attributes. By controlling the attribute pairings, the researcher can estimate the respondent’s utility for each level of each attribute tested.