Discount womens apparel

Discount Chains Downplay Sales

Last year, discounters apparently played down apparel promotions, as higher-priced department stores fought back with their own aggressive apparel campaigns.

As a group, Sears, JCPenney and Montgomery Ward also were much more aggressive in promoting apparel items on sale than discount stores.

Discounters attracted far fewer sales shoppers in some of their key promotional categories including women's lingerie, clothing, blouses and shirts, men's shirts and shoes.

The type of apparel merchandise and price points retailers used to draw traffic changed considerably during 1989. The category as a whole continued to represent just over 40 percent of all merchandise promotions that had enticed consumers to shop, based on findings from the fourth annual Traffic Builders Survey, conducted for DSN by Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, the Chicago-based consumer research firm.

While women's apparel remained the most highly promoted segment of the apparel business, a new effort was made to stimulate traffic through promotions of men's and children's goods.

The result was a doubling of the number of men's shirts promotions consumers were responding to, a near doubling in response to children's clothing ads, and an upswing in infants'/toddlers' clothing mentions.

These promotions also resulted in better sell-through than they had in 1988. For example, only 57 percent of all people who had gone shopping for men's shirts after seeing them advertised actually made a purchase in 1988. Last year, the number of people who walked out of the store with a man's shirt rose to nearly 79 percent. Better selection of style and color, especially at mass merchandisers, contributed to the upswing in the men's shirt business.

Similarly, the percentage of shoppers who bought advertised infants'/toddlers' clothing rose from 50 percent in 1988 to 76 percent last year. In children's clothing, the purchase rate rose from 62 percent to 78 percent.

The good news is, people are more likely to buy most advertised items; the bad news is, these consumers are spending considerably less at the cash register.

The mean ticket of those shoppers who bought a man's shirt in 1988 was $51; this fell to $33 in 1989. Women's jogging suits generated an average ticket of $41 in 1988 but only $21 last year. The average ticket on a purchase that was spurred by a promotion for women's blouses/shirts fell to $35 from $47 and for women's jeans, the average ticket sunk to $45 from $56.

Apparel items like lingerie/sleepwear, infants'/toddlers' and women's dress pants/slacks did run against this trend, with higher tickets generated last year than the year before. These increases, however, were not as pronounced as the decreases.

Women's blouses and shirts replaced women's lingerie/sleepwear as the most frequently mentioned item consumers had seen on sale and went to buy. While the total number of mentions declined, department stores wrested a larger share of those mentions from discounters and the Sears, Penney and Ward shoppers. The percentage of mentions rose to 11.2 percent at department stores in 1989 from 3.4 percent in 1988.

Similarly, of shoppers who named the broad category of women's clothing as the sale item they went to shop, more than twice as many mentioned a department store in 1989 than in 1988. The same number of shoppers said women's clothing was the promotion to which they were responding - 1.9 percent of the total - but fewer mentioned discounters than full-price department stores.

Sears, Penney and Ward also gave up a large portion of their promotional men's shirt business to department stores. The total number of shoppers who mentioned men's shirts as the item they saw on promotion doubled to nearly 2 percent. At the same time, department stores claimed 19 percent of that business, up from 7.1 percent just last year. Sears, Penney and Ward, taken together, saw their share fall from 64.3 percent of the promotional shirt business to 38.9 percent.

Women's jeans were promoted more heavily in 1989, rising to 3.4 percent of all mentions from 1.5 percent in 1988. Discounters were evidently not promoting the category as vigorously. Discounters were mentioned only 56.9 percent of the time, compared with 63.6 percent in 1988. The other channels gained mentions.

Discounters also lost ground in another of its strongest promotional categories, men's shoes and boots. In 1988, 77.8 percent of all consumers responding to men's shoes and boots sales went to discount stores. No one mentioned department stores; 11 percent mentioned Sears, Penney and Ward. In 1989, those three retailers captured 26 percent of customers responding to a shoes or boots sale, while discounters tumbled down to 57.6 percent.

Mentions of men's shoes and boots, like most categories, were roughly split between frequent and infrequent customers. The most significant exceptions to this tendency are among shoppers of promoted women's jeans and women's shoes/boots.

Women's jeans on promotion were among the most effective traffic builders for the apparel department in all general merchandise stores; but this also means they are the least effective in getting new customers to shop the store. In 1988, more new shoppers were attracted by advertising; only 54 percent were frequent shoppers as compared to 63 percent a year ago. [Tabular Data Omitted]

PHOTO : Womens lingerie/sleepwear attracted the greatest percentage of shoppers who purchased a sale item.

PHOTO : Women's blouses/skirts were the most frequently cited apparel category in terms of the number of shoppers responding to a sale.