Article
Bridging Digital Sentiment with Physical Retail Metrics: An AI-Driven Hybrid Analysis of Consumer Behaviour in India's Innerwear and Athleisure Markets
Purpose: This study examines omnichannel consumer behaviour in India's innerwear and athleisure retail markets, with particular attention to the divergent dynamics of digital sentiment and physical store experience across urban tiers.
Design/Methodology/Approach: A mixed-methods framework is employed, integrating computational sentiment analysis of 1,156 publicly sourced Google Maps reviews with primary survey data from 105 respondents across Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. Sentiment scoring was conducted using both TextBlob and a fine-tuned BERT model (nlptown/bert-base-multilingual-uncased-sentiment). Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to identify thematic clusters. Hypotheses were tested via chi-square analysis using SPSS.
Findings: The analysis reveals an 88.8% positivity rate in online reviews, yet identifies critical dissatisfaction clusters—most notably staff expertise deficits (cited in 34% of negative reviews) and Tier 2 price sensitivity (71%). While 68.5% of consumers prefer in-store purchasing for tactile validation, online channels demonstrate dominance in discount-driven purchase occasions. BERT outperformed lexicon-based TextBlob in detecting sarcastic sentiment (67% accuracy) and surfacing latent themes such as 'staff impact' (23.4% topic prevalence). Regional differences in buying behaviour were statistically significant (p = 0.01), validating the Underwear Index as a behavioural heuristic in recessionary contexts.
Originality/Value: This study makes a novel methodological contribution by triangulating AI-driven sentiment analysis with survey instruments to produce a channel-comparative understanding of consumer behaviour. It extends Transaction Cost Economics and Veblenian conspicuous consumption theory to emerging-market retail contexts, and offers actionable frameworks for omnichannel strategy, staff training, and technology adoption in India's rapidly evolving apparel sector.