Consumer's Product Knowledge and Information Search related to Clothing

소비자 의류 제품 지식과 외적 정보 탐색 활동에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the consumer's product knowledge and his/her ability to obtain information when buying clothing. For the purpose of this study, questionnaires were given to 550 university students living in Seoul and the Kwgi area. The questionnaires were designed to measure the consumer's knowledge about examine his/her method of gathering information and to obtain some personal information Vsing a base of 407 students, data was analyzed through cross- tabulation, the chi square test, the t-test, the one-way ANOVA accompanied by a post-hoc analysis with the Tukey method, Pearson's correlation coefficient, and the Spearman rho. The results of this study were as follows. 1) There was a significant difference in the amount of iuormation seeking between groups with different knowledge related to clothing. 2) The use of information sources was found to be significantly related to the consumer's subjective and objective knowledge. 3) The consumer's level of knowledge about clothing was related to the store characteristics that he/she took into consideration. The difference between the groups came from the number of store characteristics taken into consideration, rather than from the contents. The group that had more knowledge related to clothing was more aware of store characteristics than the other level stoup. Price, quality, uniqueness, and variety of clothing were equally important to by groups. 4) A moderate relationship was found between the consumer's subjective and objective knowledge, and between his/her purchasing experience and objective knowledge. There was a relatively high relationship between purchasing experience and subjective knowledge.