A cross-national study of young female consumer behaviour, innovativeness and apparel evaluation: China and India

In order to advance our knowledge about consumers’ shopping behaviour and preferences in two emerging markets (China and India), the current study was undertaken to investigate (1) apparel consumers’ shopping behaviour; (2) the effect of consumer innovativeness, and (3) the salient impact of apparel evaluative cues. An online self-administered survey consisted of shopping behavioural questions, the Domain Specific Innovativeness (DSI) scale, 12 apparel cues, and demographic questions were used for this study. In total, 266 and 236 usable data were collected from Chinese and Indian female participants respectively. The findings indicated that Chinese and Indian fashion innovators tended to spend more money on new clothes than non-innovators. Chinese fashion innovators spent significantly more time shopping online than did Indian innovators. In terms of the importance of evaluative cues, fashion innovators and non-innovators in both countries considered fit to be the most important cue; style, colour, and comfort played a relatively important role in clothing evaluation as well, but ease of care and durability were cited as relatively less important among many other cues. The two least important cues were brand name and country of origin.