CHAPTER 1 - University of Exeter

16
Chapter 1 - Introduction
earlier, a variety of researchers had focused their attention on developing ways of
grouping shoppers into different categories. Shopper typologies were created to
segment consumers into groups on the basis of their shopping preferences. In general
it can be said that the shopper typology literature proposes a relatively simple
difference between people who like shopping and people who do not (Reid &
Brown, 1996). In this vein, Stone (1954) seems to be the first researcher to approach
the issue of shopping typologies. He surveyed 124 female department store shoppers
about their shopping preferences and on the basis of cluster analysis, concluded that
his sample could be divided into four different groups of shoppers: economic
shoppers; personalizing shoppers; ethical shoppers; and apathetic shoppers. The
economic shopper is first and foremost concerned about price and quality of a given
product. The personalizing shopper is much more concerned with having the
opportunity to interact with other people during the shopping activity than being
concerned with price and quality. In other words, in the personalizing shopper’s
mind, price and quality come second to the possibility of interaction with other
people (Hewer & Campbell, 1997). This shopper goes out to shop for reasons other
than just shopping alone; s/he enjoys the social interaction s/he gets with other
people while s/he is out and the actual shopping task (which for the economic
shopper is the reason to go shopping in the first place) only comes second. Then
there is the ethical shopper, who considers moral factors when making a purchase,
and last but not least, the apathetic shopper for whom shopping is an unpleasant
activity which is done merely out of necessity. Since Stone (1954) asked his
respondents rather broad questions about their shopping orientations – such as
“would you rather do business with local independent merchants or large chain
stores?” – this typology can be seen as a general one. From Stone’s viewpoint it