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”.