NEXT GEN RETAILING: AN EMPERICAL STUDY ON THE PARADIGM SHIFTS OF INDIAN RETAILING

ABSTRACT The Indian retail sector goes through a modification and therefore the emerging market is witnessing a significant change in its growth and investment pattern. Apart from the brick-mortar formats, brick-click and click-click formats are also increasingly visible on the Indian retail landscape. With a growing economy, improving income dynamics, rising awareness, and a youth-heavy client base, India is well on its way to become one among the foremost prospective markets for the domestic and international retailers. The Indian retail sector is undergoing a paradigm shift and `Next Generation Retailing' has evolved with new standards and benchmarks set for the industry, with higher and sophisticated technology at one end and increasing client focus on the other. In view of the other, the present paper makes a noble attempt to define `Next-Generation Retailing' and describe its characteristic features by using factor analysis and focuses on the benefits of Next Generation Retailers in the Indian context. The current paper seeks to spot and identify the drivers which affect the growth of the Indian retail market and look at the major factors affecting the retail business in India. For this purpose a structured questionnaire was constructed to gather shopping preferences from 300 respondents in Bhubaneswar. Descriptive Analysis, ANOM and ANOVA were also used to verify whether there is a significant difference between consumers’ buying behavior of shopping and convenience goods from different retail formats. The findings of the paper reveal that consumers’ prefer modern retail formats due its significant product attributes like improved quality, variety of brands and assortment of merchandise and store attributes like parking facility, trained sales personnel and complete security. The results show that socio-demographic variables such as age, education, accompany, and family size as well as packaging, store environment, and price of products have influence on retail format choice.