Analyzing the Visual Merchandising Elements for the Apparel Retailers

Visual merchandising plays a key role, basically for pursuing the customer to enter the store by making the store attractive and changing the perceived image from the view point of consumers. The brand image and the retailers' image can be emphasized with the combination of these visual merchandising components. The aim of this study is to analyze and to compare the selection of design elements of different type of retailers such as fast fashion retailers, luxury apparel retailers, sportswear retailers or the retailers presenting products for women, men or both. To this aim, a content analysis was applied among 36 apparel retailers acting in Turkey. The findings showed that the visual merchandising elements were inarguably well employed by the luxury brand retailers, which was followed with the retailers selling high price fashion products. Among the visual merchandising elements special lightning and window displays were seen to be favored by all the retailers. Besides, the selection of different types of visual element were found to be based on the target customer group, while the apparel retailers selling products for females only are much more caring about the visual merchandising, it was vice versa for the apparel retailers selling only menswear.