Clustering Consumers Through their Consumption Behavior: Analysis on the Fashion Industry

Abstract

The actual paper aimed to confirm the validity of the consumer styles inventory scale, developed by Sproles and Kendall (1986) on people aged 18-45 years based on their consumption behaviour when it comes to the clothing industry. In this respect, I applied the consumer styles inventory scale on individuals from the Romanian space aged 18-45 years, the responses being collected via online platforms. To the gathered data were applied, in the first part, an exploratory analysis, followed by confirmatory factor analysis. In the second part, the K-means cluster analysis was used to segment individuals in distinct groups based on their demographic characteristics and their financial involvement in purchasing fashion items. The output of the k-means cluster analysis distinguished eight segments of consumers defined as: "casual consumer", "quality-seeker consumer", "irrational consumer", "indifferent consumer", "habitual consumer", "occasional consumer", "fashion consciousness consumer" and "passive consumer".