VISUAL MERCHANDISING TECHNIQUES AND CUSTOMER PREFERENCE ON SELECTING

Supermarket industry is one of the fast growing industries in Sri Lanka. At present there are over 300 supermarkets in the industry owned by various companies. According to the prevailing literature many researchers agreed with that visual merchandising plays a vital role in retailing. It has become an essentially important element in the retailing industry, in apparel store, supermarkets etc. Therefore, every marketer pays attention to this aspect in order to attract the customers and to survive in the industry. Hence the problem centered in this study was whether there is an impact on visual merchandising on patronage intentions in super markets in Colombo city limits. The main objective of this study is to identify the influence of visualmerchandising on patronage intentions. As specific objectives researchers tried to identify the more important visual merchandising techniques used by supermarkets within Colombo City limits and to identify the widely used visual merchandizing techniques by different supermarket chains in operating in the Colombo city limits.This study was based on secondary and primary data. Primary data was collected through the survey and semistructured questionnaire was used to collect the data. The study considered a sample of 307 supermarket shoppers from five different supermarkets located within Colombo City limits, i.e. from Colombo 1 to Colombo 15. Hypotheses were tested by ANOVA analysis employing SPSS software. Out of all six hypotheses five were accepted and only one hypothesis was rejected. The more important visual merchandising techniques that would influence patronage intentions were product display, cleanliness and colour respectively. Cargills Food City gives priority for cleanliness and lighting while Keels Super and Arpico Super Center pay much attention on store layout and product display.Key Words: Visual Merchandising, Patronage Intentions, Supermarket, Retailing, Customers For full paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.l