Applying grey relational grade on the exploration of different lifestyle female consumers' preferences towards the appearance of cars

With the development of the times, female driver population has largely increased year by year so that it is hard to ignore the market of them. Since the lifestyle may be one of the important factors affecting female consumer's car purchasing decision, to understand the different lifestyle female consumers' preferences towards the appearance of cars has become a crucial issue for the car industry. This study aims to explore different lifestyle female consumers' preferences towards the appearance of cars and to provide a reference for car's development and marketing. This study was carried out by the questionnaire method and the grey relational grade was used to divide the whole respondents into different clusters according to their lifestyles. The respondents were clustered as three types of lifestyle from the 280 valid questionnaires. The results reveal that female consumers prefer the image words ¿lively, streamlined, oncoming, cute, feminine, and elegant¿, but don't prefer the image words ¿regular, staid, straight, dull, masculine, and vulgar¿. In addition, lifestyle can influence the females' preferences towards to the appearance of cars, but the effect is not so significant.