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Introduction
Recent growth in the US Hispanic market has created substantial market opportunities for many companies looking to grow their customer bases. This market opportunity coincides with the move from manufacturer to customer-oriented product development processes across industries. Due to these shifts, accurate customer knowledge is more important than ever and is widely considered to be the best method for delivering products matched to customer needs ([22] Kotler, 2000).
Though the apparel industry has recognized the importance of integrating customer preferences into product development processes, actual implementation has been difficult when targeting the Hispanic consumer. A relative scarcity exists regarding apparel-specific market and product preferences for the Hispanic consumer. Of the existing information, findings often contradict each other, rendering it difficult to implement into apparel design processes. As a result, the industry frequently relies on stereotypical descriptions of the Hispanic consumer to guide their development processes. This research study collected information that enables a better understanding of Hispanic women's apparel fit preferences, an attribute that seems to be particularly dominated by cultural stereotypes.
Objectives
This research explored Hispanic women's fit preferences for casual tops, pants, skirts, and dresses. To understand the characteristics that shape these preferences, the study also analyzed whether self-reported physical body characteristics of body shape perception, BMI, and clothing size, affected apparel fit preferences. Recognizing the heterogeneity of the US Hispanic market as a whole, the sample was restricted to Mexican-American women between the ages of 18 and 25 from the southwestern USA. This controlled for the effects of gender, age, subculture, and geography on the variables of interest in the study.
Literature review
Hispanic apparel consumers
Significant growth in the US Hispanic market has created a consumer group that many industries cannot afford to ignore. The US Census reported that there were 45.5 million Hispanics in the USA as of July 1, 2007, which represented about 15 percent of the total US population ([4] Bernstein, 2008). This growth is expected to continue due to immigration and high birth rates ([21] Kim et al. , 2007), with a projected 25 percent of the total population being Hispanic by the year 2050. As significant as these estimates are, they underestimate the true population size due to the inability to count undocumented immigrants...