Apparel Product Quality: Its Nature and Measurement

An important issue of apparel - apparel product quality -has not been significantly addressed in past research, particularly where the pre-purchase perceptions of consumers are concerned. The goal of this study is to identify how consumers define intrinsic apparel product quality. This will be accomplished by 1) examining the issue of quality as applied to products, 2) exploring past research on apparel product quality, 3) constructing a scale (ApparEx) to assess intrinsic apparel product quality, and 4) relating ApparEx with service quality as measured by SERVQUAL. Product quality is the consumer’s judgment of the standard of performance for a product. The cues used by consumers to judge quality can be classified as either intrinsic or extrinsic. While the topic of apparel product quality has been examined in the literature, the focus of such efforts has been largely on perceptions of apparel quality resulting from post-use or post-exposure analysis. What has not received significant research attention are the pre-use expectations or beliefs about intrinsic apparel quality. These pre-use expectations can be expected to be a primary determining factor of consumer purchasing behavior. The initial stage in the development of an instrument to measure prepurchase perceptions of intrinsic apparel product quality is to generate a set of items deemed to cover the domain of the intrinsic apparel product quality construct. Since the literature suggests that this construct is multi-dimensional in nature, the scale was developed with the goal of identifying and measuring the salient dimensions of intrinsic apparel product quality. Drawn from studies of consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction with apparel items, texts documenting apparel manufacturing standards, and from technical standards drawn by the American Association for Textile Technology, eight dimensions of apparel quality were proposed. Seventy-four items were developed based on the above sources to address each proposed dimension of the construct. Four forms of the instrument were constructed, each focusing on a different apparel product classification (underwear/lingerie or sleepwear, casual sportswear, dresswear, and coats and jackets (outerwear)). The sampling design used in this study was a purposive one, using students enrolled in upper-division (junior and senior level) university business courses at major universities located in the Midwest and in the Southern U.S. The instrument was administered on-site to students present in selected business classes chosen to preclude the possibility of students being solicited more than once. Of the 984 questionnaires distributed, 131 were not determined to be usable, resulting in a usable return rate of 86.6 percent. Interestingly, the results suggest that the findings were not significantly different between the product categories indicating that the subject data may reasonably be pooled. A factor analysis resulted in seven factors being retained: 1) performance, 2) components, 3) garment care, 4) appearance, 5) construction/workmanship, 6) style/fashion, and 7) fit. While the pattern does not reproduce exactly the relationships proposed in the early stages of ApparEx development, the results were largely consistent. How well does the measure relate to other constructs to which the construct is theoretically related? This was accomplished by relating ApparEx with SERVQUAL, an instrument developed to measure the related concept of service quality. The objective was to determine how, if at all, the dimensions of the ApparEx scale relate to the dimensions of the SERVQUAL scale. The results seem to display a consistent pattern. It appears that two factors of the SERVQUAL scale (dependability and tangibility) are positively correlated with the factors of the ApparEx scale and that the other two factors of the SERVQUAL scale (empathy and responsiveness) are negatively related with the factors of the ApparEx scale. The results also suggest that the garment care factor of the ApparEx scale is not related strongly with the SERVQUAL factors, and that the style/fashion factor of the ApparEx scale relates only with the dependability and responsiveness factors of the SERVQUAL scale. These findings support the multi-dimensionality of the instrument, and that quality is not a generic phenomenon - quality as it relates to apparel products and quality as it relates to service issues appear to be two distinct concepts, at least as far as expectations are concerned. This provides additional evidence of the construct validity of the ApparEx scale. Previous research has largely ignored the consumer’s perspective in the discussion of product quality; apparel has not been an exception. In practice, intrinsic apparel product quality has been typically defined based on production-oriented standards. In the instances where the consumers’ perspective has been addressed, it is most often within the context of what is thought to be what customers desire, instead of their actual desires. The natural outcome of this approach is that a gap likely exists between what consumers want and what managers think that consumers want. The ApparEx instrument developed in this paper can provide a mechanism by which managers can directly determine the apparel product quality expectations of their clientele. The results also suggest that consumers of apparel products expect the same dimensions of quality across product category lines. If consumers hold lower expectations of quality for apparel items which cost less, it was not apparent from this study. While it is true that consumers can best objectively assess product quality only after purchase and use, and that a purchased product’s inability to adequately perform will likely affect an individual’s subsequent purchasing behavior, it is the initial prepurchase quality assessment which will have an immediate material effect on consumers’ purchasing decisions.