Middle-aged women's apparel market

A pitch letter was written based off of some of the thoughts of Tony Gao, a marketing professor at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University who specializes in retail issues, about the middle-aged women’s apparel market:

“Retailers targeting at the middle-aged women apparel market have faced with different results. Gap has decided to close their Forth and Towne stores, while American Eagle Outfitters has, on March 7th, announced plans to open 12 more Martin + Osa stores in 2007,” Prof. Gao states.

“I feel that the buying habits of women aged 25-45 differ greatly from teenagers and college students and specially apparel retailers such as Martin+Osa should use very different strategies to serve these customers than they do their younger peers.

“What are the particular buying habits of women aged 25-45?

“After following fashion trends as teenagers and college students for many years, these grown-up ladies now know what they want when it comes to buy apparel. They have become more confident in choosing on their personal style, often have formed a consistent dressing taste, and are increasingly less affected by pressure from their peers.

“They have more discretionary income to spend on clothing, but often have less time to shop given their busy work schedule as a full-time professional, a spouse, and/or mom. When they do go shopping, they are often out to fulfill multiple shopping needs both for herself and the family. Hence department stores at various positioning tiers could be more attractive than are many individual specialty stores. For this reason, online and catalog shopping is increasingly being used to buy apparel alone especially as they have gained buying experiences and developed loyalty to their apparel brands.

“Apparel shopping for middle-aged women may occur in personalized seasonality as marked by job hunting, career changes, promotions (as their experiences accumulate), and employee role changes as in the case of from one department to another.

“The professional nature of the work environment for many of these women dictates that they have to choose less provocative colors and styles and tend to focus on “being appropriate” over “being trendy”. As a result, they look more for functional benefits such as fit for varying dressing occasions, durability, wrinkle resistance, and texture over value expressive benefits such as color and styles. If fact, as many of these women are still growing in the developmental stage of their career and may even face job insecurity, based on the collegiality of their workplace, they could be more interested in avoiding peer resentment than in gaining peer admiration.

“What are the implications for retail mix strategy tailored at the middle-aged women customers?

“These differences in buying habits demand a different strategy. In-store environment is become less important for some consumers as they go online and use catalogs. In-store services should now focus on demonstrating functional benefits such as fit for varying dressing occasions, texture, and durability. Merchandising could be less driven by seasonality. Price could be higher as the quality of the merchandize goes up. There should be more use of multi-channel marketing and less use of standalone stores. Stores should be placed closer to department stores and other specialty stores. The store environment should figure less loud music, quieter and brighter in-store shopping environment, using store assistants of similar age and life experiences. Finally, the retailers should use more reward programs for long-time customers.”

Below is Prof. Gao’s bio. Please let me know if you’d like to interview him.

Tao (Tony) Gao, Assistant Professor, Marketing Group. Professor Gao received a Ph.D. in marketing from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, an M.E. in business management from Harbin Institute of Technology (Harbin, China), and a B.E. in industrial and management engineering from Hebei University of Technology (Tianjin, China). Previously, he held faculty positions at Washburn University, Hofstra University, College of William and Mary, and Hebei University of Technology (China). He also worked with the China branch of Mitsubishi Corporation (a general trading company in Japan) in the areas of international trade and joint venture developments. Professor Gao conducts research primarily on the development, governance, and consequences of buyer-seller relationships, customer value and risk perceptions, international business strategies, and business ethics. He has published in Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Research in Marketing, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Journal of Relationship Marketing, Journal of International Business and Economy, Latin American Business Review, and Multinational Business Review. For his dissertation work on industrial buyer-seller relationships, he was a former winner of the National Association of Purchasing Management (now Institute for Supply Management) Doctoral Dissertation Competition.