Purpose based strategies

: fashion industry structures and consumer buying behaviour alterations induced by Covid-19

Abstract

As a consequence of the recent Covid-19 pandemic, consumer behaviour altered drastically, raisingnumerous questions and challenges for organisations and consumers alike. This dissertation shedslight on how the current Covid-19 pandemic has altered the fashion organisations’ structure andfashion consumers buying behaviour. This implies analysing the research in two separate parts.First, the author will be analysing the organisational sector, more specifically fashion-brands and-organisations. Secondly, an analysis will be performed on fashion consumers’ consumption habitsand behaviours. Both quantitative as qualitative research was conducted to allow the researchers tohave an extensive data set to draw conclusions upon. Overall, the findings demonstrate thefundamental importance of generation aspects for purpose-driven businesses. The data, furthermoreallows for an understanding of the contributing elements to buying preferences and behaviour, againtaking the age factor into account. Despite prior theoretical models, that predicted a strongconsumer focus on ethical business, the found data does not support these predictions. While thereis a small rise in ethical importance it is not substantial, and heavily focused on youngergenerations. Finally, focussing on the organisational aspect of this dissertation, is has become clearPage 4 of 47that organisation’s are not shifting focus but instead are making their original focus more profound.Meaning that organisations focusing on CSR are developing into purpose-driven businesses, andorganisations that are maximising profits will continue to do so. Finally we can see that the reportednew road to market of organisations is more focuses on e-commerce, many of these organisationsreport that they will continue to do so out of fear for more lockdown measures.

Date of Award	28 Jan 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Vera Herédia Colaço (Supervisor) & Nuno Moreira da Cruz (Co-Supervisor)