A Study On The Acceptance Of Innovative Technologies In Clothing Retail

This study evaluates customers' acceptance of innovative technologies in a retail environment.The objective is to identify which elements of a technology are the most appreciated by the customers,in order to provide guidelines for implementing innovative technologies in retail stores.We selected five innovative technologies for the apparel retail sector which all presented different characteristics: 3D body scanner,virtual fitting,automatic fitting rooms,queueing mobile application and hangers which display social network appreciation.These technologies were evaluated through 8 constructs from technology acceptance models.Three interviews of experts,an online questionnaire with 121 valid responses,and a laboratory experiment(design project about stores in the future and questionnaire)with 15 Chinese and 15 French subjects were conducted.During these three steps,we collected enough quantitative and qualitative data to extract some interesting results.The results showed that,contrarily to what the experts thought,the least appreciated technology is the hangers because respondents feared that such a technology could lead to a standardization of clothes.The results also showed that it is important that an innovative technology be attractive to the customer,that it seems fun and entertaining.It is the case for virtual fitting which showed a significantly higher score both in attitude towards technology and behavioral intention.Finally,the analysis points out that the usefulness of a technology should not be overlooked,or the technology would just fall into the gadget category and its popularity among the customers might not last long.Usefulness was a strong point for the 3D body scanners and the automatic fitting rooms,but those two technologies lacked human contact and attractiveness.