Fashion sense : A quantitative study about how sensorial touch points affect the customer decision making process in physical fashion stores

Sustainability has been on everyone's lips in the last decade. However, the fashion industry has been proved to be the second-largest contributor to environmental destruction being just behind the oil industry. As the fashion industry keeps growing, measures need to be taken to make it more sustainable. When shopping for fashion products the channel with the least environmental cost is using physical stores. However, physical stores are becoming less and less attractive and are losing their customers to e-commerce instead, a phenomenon that has been called the retail apocalypse. When comparing physical stores to e-commerce one clear advantage that the physical stores have is that they can take advantage of sensory cues to enhance the customer's shopping experience. This thesis wants to test if sensory touchpoints in a fashion retailing environment will affect customer decision-making. Ultimately contributing to the thin available research in the field on how to make physical retailing more attractive and counteract the ongoing retail apocalypse. The empirical findings were obtained using a quantitative survey consisting of 32 questions sent out via social media to Swedish fashion customers and were analyzed through the theoretical concepts of evaluation of alternatives and purchase decision which are two of the steps in the customer decision-making process model. Concluding this thesis showed that all research questions surrounding sensorial touch points' impact on customers came back with positive outcomes