This research was conducted to examine repeat online grocery shoppers behavior based on the S-O-R paradigm (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974) for a five year time frame. Not considering any artificial intelligence, generally in the online shopping environment, the image of the store is communicated through their product and site offerings as well as their user-friendliness of the website. Childers et al. (2001) discussed hedonic aspects of an online store environment such as web atmospherics. Furthermore, with a growing importance of atmospheric cues, researchers are now paying attention to consumer characteristics (Moriuchi and Takahashi, 2018). In general, the results show that atmospherics has an impact on pleasure and satisfaction. Both pleasure and satisfaction have an effect on loyalty. Trust served as a moderator between O-R and was significant. Comparing between the 2012 and 2016 data, results show that satisfaction consumers in the 2012 sample did not see an impact on satisfaction on loyalty, and trust was not a moderating factor on satisfaction and loyalty. However, all the other hypothesized relationships were significant for the 2016 sample. The results suggest a couple of practical implications. First, the ease of navigation are important in pleasing and satisfying online grocery shoppers. Marketing practitioners should focus on how to make the overall website easily navigable. This could include having clear display of the products, reviewing of product descriptions and ease of going back to the main menu after adding items to cart. Second, marketing practitioners should focus their attention on the variety of products available and the quality of products available such as pleasure.
Introduction
The retail environment, which is offering special experience to consumers based on customized consumer lifestyle, creates customer value from voluntary customer engagement. In recent study, it is shown that customer engagement is becoming an important factor which determines the characteristics of customer behavior in the retail and hospitality industries. However, the study of customer engagement has mainly focused on its performance in marketing field ( Hapsari, Clemes, and Dean, 2017; Kumar and Pansari, 2016) and most researches have handled the concept of customer engagement from the perspective of online environment(Shin and Byun, 2016; Jeon, 2016).
Theoretical Development
This study aims to investigate the psychological motivation for customer engagement and to examine the underlying factors of customer behavior in offline retail environment based on experience economy theory and Self-Determination Theory(SDT). First, this study investigates the relationship between perceived psychological benefits (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) and intrinsic motivation. Also, this study tried to analyze the relationship between intrinsic motivation and customer engagement (conscious participation, enthusiasm, and social interaction). Second, we tried to examine the relationship between customer engagement and customer creation value (functional value, hedonic value, and social value). Thirdly, we suggested the effect of customer creation value on customer purchasing behavior (shopping memories, customer satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and revisit intention). In addition, we attempted to find the mediating effect of the hedonic value between customer engagement and shopping memories; customer engagement and customer satisfaction. Futhermore, we investigated the mediating effect of shopping experience between hedonic value and customer satisfaction. Finally, We discussed the managerial implication for differentiated competitive advantage in the experience-based retail environment.
Research Design and Model Testing
To test the research hypotheses and our research model, we conducted questionnaire survey from the respondents who have ever been to the major experience-based shopping malls within 6 months. Through the confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and validity of the study constructs were verified. By using the structural equation model, research hypotheses were tested and most research hypotheses were statistically significant and accepted. The final research model also showed the statistical significance with the goodness-of-fit indices.
Result and Conclusion
As shown in the results of this study, the experience-based retail environment leads to higher customer engagement and increase the customer’s hedonic value and reinforce positive shopping memories. Specifically, the experience-based retail environment is offering psychological benefits and customers enjoy experience itself. During the shopping experience, the customers are motivated for customer engagement. The managerial implications of the study results for the corporate managers in the retail and/or hospitality industries were also discussed.
A consumer is an individual entity with various motivations. This study is intended to incorporate a hierarchical structure of motivation to understand self-determined motivation for purchasing secondhand merchandise at thrift stores. A conceptual model adopted from Cadwallader et al. (2010)’s comprehensive model of motivation used in a marketing context was developed to investigate motivational process in secondhand merchandise shopping. The conceptual model includes the three levels of motivational structure–the global, contextual (environmental concern and frugality), and situational motivation. A series of the causal relationships among the three levels of self-determined motivations and buying intention to shop at thrift stores were hypothesized. A total of 219 respondents from two different northeastern state universities in the U.S. completed a self-administered survey. The results indicated that secondhand merchandise shopping is well explained in the hierarchical structure of self-determined motivation where the global motivation had a positive impact on the contextual motivations regarding environmental concern and frugality. Of the two contextual motivations, only environmental concern had a positive impact on situational motivation for shopping at thrift stores. Finally, the situational motivation positively influenced the intention to shop at thrift stores. The results of this model suggest that the hierarchical structure of self-determined motivation would be a very useful framework to understand consumer behavior for apparel shopping. Also, further research can be done to identify other contextual motivational factors to understand consumer motivation for shopping at thrift stores.