Consumer Behavior- Ethnographic Research on Victoria's Secret and Target

For this project, I chose Target’s department store because, one, I am an employee there and most importantly I felt that it showed different types of people in multiple ways through its products. For my first observation my goal was to examine how the store was arranged, the products that

I am a business major taking this course, in part, to understand how gender is used in marketing, and how organizations can manipulate the fluidity of gender to control purchasing decisions. I feel that a business perspective is not used often when discussing the sociology of gender and so I will use this opportunity to draw upon my business education and hopefully provide a unique perspective to the issue of gendered experiences. My observation will look at how shopping has become an increasingly gendered experience, forcing individuals to conform to normative expectations and even contributing to gender expectations becoming internalized in society. To start, we must recognize that gender is a social construct that assigns roles to women

Victoria Secret was founded in by Roy Raymond, and his wife Gaye, in San Francisco, California, on June 12, 1977. The company got its start when Roy Raymond was trying to shop for lingerie for his wife. He’d gone to a department store to make his purchase, only to find himself deeply uncomfortable and made even more so by saleswomen scrutinizing his presence there. “When I tried to buy lingerie for my wife,” Raymond told Newsweek in 1981, “I was faced with racks of terry-cloth robes and ugly floral-print nylon nightgowns, and I always had the feeling the department-store saleswomen thought I was an unwelcome intruder.” Raymond saw an opportunity in his discomfort and in 1977 borrowed $80,000 to open Victoria’s Secret as a store designed originally to make men comfortable when buying lingerie for their wives.

For generations, Americans has been brainwashed by the media to believe that what is displayed on television is the ideal perception of what real beauty have manipulated American citizens of what style looks like. Furthermore, with their many brainwashing strategies, that means more and more consumers spending beyond their budget. Our perspectives have been heavily influenced by what they believe is nice, but can we afford it all? With unrealistic combination of goods in store, plazas, and mall, consuming has become a bad behavior of some. In support of my argument of the “Overspending”, author Gladwell’s article “The Science of Shopping” also argues that stores adjust to fit the needs and wants of the shopper are evidently presented. With that being said, we have no idea when we are being manipulated into unrealistic shopping behavior that is influenced by the way the advertisement is presented in visual sight. Author Gladwell gets a “retail anthropologist” and “urban geographer” named Paco Underhill to give breakdown points of how he helps brand name stores influence consumers into persuasion of buying more. However, most of us fall short of that discipline, while being persuaded to overspend during our store visits.

We live in a society where we are watched constantly by social media, twitter, employers and even shopping surveillance cameras. Although each outlet has its different uses for watching, there are pros and cons. Social media may share life styles or events with users with just a touch of a button or click of a mouse. Twitter updates the user with instant news about certain individuals or celebrities and what is trending. An employer keeps a watchful eye on a new employee to make sure they are the right fit for the company or can also watch to make sure their assets are secure. Surveillance is mostly thought of as monitoring assets, but what about the true assets it monitors, the consumer at a store. Consumers are the bread and butter of the store, without the consumer there are no sales, and if no sales then there would be no store. I refute the claim that the retail anthropologists’ surveillance of consumers is manipulative or unethical. In fact, I think the surveillance of consumers can help both the retailer and the consumer. Surveillance can provide an overall good shopping experience for both consumer and retailer. The surveillance videos can show which products the consumer wants and buys, it can help the retailer place good products in good organizational areas, and provide not only the consumer, but the retailer with a good overall shopping experience.

Consumers have certain behavioral tendencies when faced in certain situations. In Why We Buy, the author Paco Underhill details certain behavioral characteristics people tend to have in different types of retail stores. Many consumers don’t think about what their actions mean when checking out or buying products. But to Mr. Underhill, the gender of the person, the people they’re with, the amount of times the person touches an object, the amount of time spent on checking a particular product, the time they came in, and the time they leave, all factor into a database to determine different behavioral trend consumers have. It is these trends that they find in order to correct a problem a store or retailer didn’t know they have to increase sales and create a better flow in the store environment.

Founded by Roy Raymond in 1977, now their sales have reached over $6 billion. Through catalogues, thousands of stores, and their website, Victoria’s Secret sell bath and body products, clothing for all seasons, shoes, and of course, undergarments. Roy Raymond started Victoria’s Secret in San Francisco in 1977, basically because he was depressed by the choices of undergarments when he was shopping for his wife. He was thoroughly unimpressed by the styles and the choice of materials designers were using in 1977. Also, he complained that the sales people made him unwelcomed and as if he were intruding on something highly personal. He vowed to have a place men could pick highly desirable pieces of undergarments

Victoria Secret appears to be a profitable company. Victoria Secret is part of L Brands whose operating income was at $ 211 million, up by $24 million from the last quarter. Specifically at Victoria's Secret, sales increased by 4% to reach 5.4 billion but operating income decreased by 6% to 1.71 billion. It appears that Victoria Secret's major expense was their Cost of Goods Sold, COGS, which totaled at 1.3144 billion. The gross profit percentage as at February 2013 was 47.87% (NASDAQ, 2014).

“I have a few fragrances that I have spent hundreds of dollars on at the time but only wore them 3 times or so. They were expensive bottles and since I don't wear them anymore (because I lost interest in them) I am looking to buy more so this time I want to do it smarter. I went to a local Nordstrom to test out a bunch but still could not find anything I like. Then I found this website where you can buy perfume samples in little sprayers (never knew you could do that) so I decided to buy a bunch of samples. “

Modern marketing management works hard to resolve the common problems of consumption of products. The study of consumer behavior is therefore very significant in marketing in ensuring survivability of the firm. There is a lot of rivalry in every industry, and the company needs to be very innovative and recognize the latest tastes and the need for the consumers. The information gained in studying consumer behavior can be extremely crucial in helping to exploit the available market opportunities. This report analyzes the consumer behavior using two fashion apparel brands, Gucci and Gap. Gucci and Gap are international companies with their bases in different countries and continents. They have both been ranked in Forbes Global 2000 list of largest companies worldwide. The market segment of the two companies is different with Gucci targeting the wealthy folks (including children, youth and old people) and Gap targeting twenty-five to thirty-five middle-class consumer. Due to the difference in the nature of the products sold by the two brands, their consumers portray different kind of behavior. These different behaviors provide the fantastic scenario to analyze and understand consumer behavior.

Victoria's Secret vs. Fredericks of Hollywood Victoria's Secret was founded Roy Raymond in 1977. The initial idea to create the Lingerie brand came from Raymond looking to make lingerie purchase for his wife and was too afraid to been seen shopping for lingerie in a department store. He immediately thought of the idea to create a luxury line that doesn't make you feel out of place. Victoria's Secret has been and still remains the largest American lingerie company of its kind.

Bruce, M. & Daly, L. (2006). Buyer behavior for fast fashion, Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management , Vol. 10 No. 3 , pp. 329-344

This study however, extends to analyzing the consumers psychological behaviors during the shopping period rather than before and after. This compliments Alain d’Astous and Melanie Levesque’s study in that the stores unique personality will have a direct impact on consumer’s psychological attributes and emotions relating to purchases and loyalty to the company. It also contains a direct link to Dong-Mo Koo’s study in which attitudes are created through in-store activities and have a direct correlation to consumer satisfaction and store loyalty. Alain d’Astous and Melanie Levesque’s study reviews the pleasantness of the store to be directly related to time and money spent by the consumer. In this study the research is conducted when consumers have already entered the store and measures the consumer’s emotional responses against their time and money spent.

The behavior was observed from a large sample of people. This included twenty people shopping alone and twenty people shopping in a group, for a total of forty subjects, each ranging in ages from approximately 19 to 40 years old. The subjects were observed from the time they entered the store until the time they left. The reasoning behind this was to see the buying behavior differences for the whole experience and figure out which areas of the store could be improved in order to appeal to groups of people shopping. The behaviors observed included the amount of time spent inside the store, the amount of money spent, the interactions with associates, and the areas of the stores that were navigated.

Understanding consumer buying behavior entails marketing, relationships, and consumer behavior. Consumer behavior comprises all the consumer decisions and activities connected with the choosing, buying, using and disposing of goods and services. Marketers must pay very close attention to consumer behavior that occurs before the purchase and after the particular product has been used. Studying consumer habits is one of the steps in marketing search and analysis. In addition to other basic principles of consumer buying habits, marketers also need to study the decision and actions of real people. Until recent history the study of consumer behavior was focused on generalized consumer decisions. With