Marketing Mini-Project

Category:

Woman or manÐŽ¦s shoes

Three Stores:

Aldo, Payless Shoes, SportÐŽ¦s Check,

Observations

We pick three different stores that have different characteristics throughout the store decoration, sales, and the style of the shoes that each of the store carries. The stores are Aldo, payless shoes, and sportÐŽ¦s check. Aldo carries fashion shoes which attract people who are more considering about the look of themselves. Payless Shoes has different brand of shoes and style with lower price which is more acceptable than most of the shoe stores; however, the selection of shoes are less and not trendy. SportÐŽ¦s Check provides more selections of outdoor shoes which targets the people who are seeking for and considering about the functionalities and comfortableness.

ALDO

During the observation, the characteristic of consumers can be divided into age, sex, and professions. In Aldo, the purchased groups are mostly female and very few male. AldoÐŽ¦s targeted consumers are people who are capable of sustaining a higher price range of trendy products. Moreover, the ratio of space used to display female and male products in all Aldo branches is about three to two. Although the display products are updated on a biweekly basis, menÐŽ¦s shoes updates every quarter. Aldo targets mainly in female consumers because female consumers often do luxury shopping. In contrast, male consumers update their outfit and accessories on a more irregular basis. As well, we noticed that female and male in suite would spend longer time looking and try wearing the shoes. Since the shoes these people choose from represent and illustrate his or her professionalism, the style and color of the shoes that they prefer are usually simple, classic and monotone. Younger people aged around eighteen to twenty-five often look for shoes that are trendy, fancy, and stylish. To the young group, shoes play a crucial part of fashion. Last but not least, another interesting point we also noticed is that, unlike women, very few male consumer do luxury shopping. Male consumers usually discover their need first before going out to purchase the product; whereas most female consumers purchase unneeded products due to various factors such as pricing, salesperson, and mood. Men spend much lesser time than woman in choosing and trying his desired shoes. Most man would ask for assistance for recommendations in picking up the right shoes.

PAYLESS SHOES

As itÐŽ¦s titled, people pay less for the shoes. In the store, most of the costumers are from average income families. There are children with mother who can only afford lower price products just to save some money in buying the shoes for themselves or the children. They spend time on looking at the price and examine the comfortableness of the shoes rather than looking at the style. In our observation, many of the adult customers would glance at the price first and pick up their desired preferences of shoes to try it on if the price is acceptable. In Payless Shoes, the price is an important concern to the consumer who chooses to shop at there. For the convenience in looking and comparing the price, each of the shoe boxes is attached with a big yellow tag which shows a large discounted price with a crossed original price. The big yellow tag on each box provides the convenience for the consumers to compare all the prices without having to move around and pick up the product before they can check for the price. However, we found that they have a mark up on the retail price and the discounted price of all products for approximately 25% throughout the whole year. The strategy of marking the original price up by 25% seems to work well in their stores. The discounted price leads its consumer to believe they have bargains on making purchase of the products that are already inexpensive. On the other hand, the environment and the space is more closed and crowed with piles of shoe shelves aligned one another, providing the customers a feeling of reduced- humiliation in shopping at a low priced store. Thus, in our observation we can see that most of the customer would spend lot of time picking boxes of shoes to try them on and putting them back. Since