In the current situation where the sluggish economy continues and the household consumer spending has drastically fallen, people’s life trend gradually changes. Consumers would rather stay at home much longer than ever and pursue their happiness in...
In the current situation where the sluggish economy continues and the household consumer spending has drastically fallen, people’s life trend gradually changes. Consumers would rather stay at home much longer than ever and pursue their happiness in daily life as well as express their own life style with their individual living space, which has eventually generated a new consumer demand. In line with this new trend, home furnishing specialty companies have entered the local market, and the local companies have come to take this trend as a new opportunity and launch various home furnishing brands. Likewise, it is becoming crucial for home furnishing market to establish a corporate identity and brand image that ensure differentiation in fierce competition. Moreover, although recently department stores’ sales have gone down, the industry has perceived this new trend on the market and gone so far as to expand their business operations each in their own way.
Today, the consumption trend has transformed from being satisfied with the function of product to enhancing consumer’s life satisfaction or quality of life. In other words, this shift necessitates a certain type of communication space to provide consumers with combined experience and the intangible value, challenging the reigning custom of merely displaying products. This trend is in many ways closely linked to experience marketing and the VMD strategies. In the past, visual merchandising strategy was mainly employed to motivate consumers to make purchases in that VMD strategy was simply defined as a way of presenting an image of product, store, company, and its brand. More recently, however, the emergence of experience marketing has played a pivotal role in maximizing VMD strategy since experience marketing helps not only to attract purchasing activities but also to secure the potential customers by providing customers with the empirical values.
Within this context, this study aims to: 1) compare and analyze experience marketing with VMD in home furnishing shop of the local department stores and that of the foreign home furnishing brand in the local market, one which has not been discussed thus far; 2) become basic data for setting up an effective and competitive store when planning to remodel the existing home furnishing store or to open a brand-new home furnishing store.
The research methods for this subject are two folds: literature reviews and preceding studies, both of which are effective in theoretically examining both the components of VMD strategies and the value factors of experiential marketing and home furnishing. Additionally, this study conducted spatial analysis based upon the on-site expert inspection and invented an evaluation table. Relatedly, this study conducted a survey with consumers who had an experience of visiting the aforementioned specific home furnishing stores, analyzed this survey, and eventually concluded the followings: 1) home furnishing shop in department stores should make an effort to maximize the effect of VMD as a strategic tool to map out and differentiate based on experience marketing; 2) home furnishing shop in department stores needs to differentiate from that of rivals its own story and concept with the company’s brand in terms of purposes or themes; 3) home furnishing shop in department stores must illustrate the distinguished identity of its own company and brand by constructing separate place for show room, show window, and VP that suggest various modes of lifestyle; 4) the common furnishings of home furnishing shop in department stores should be special in terms of their function and character so that consumers could feel comfortable with purchasing.
This study has embodied the particular strategies exclusively for home furnishing shop in department stores by analyzing experience marketing and VMD from consumer’s perspective. By way of focusing on comparing and analyzing the advanced case study between home furnishing shop of foreign department stores and that of local department stores, the further researches would function as strategic tools utilized for department stores.