An Exploratory Investigation of the Impact of Consumer Emotions and Attitudes on Patronage Intention After Mall Shooting Episodes

Abstract

Acts of gun violence at shopping malls have been occurring with greater frequency in recent years (O’Donnell 2014). These incidents can have a devastating impact on business if consumers do not return to the mall after the incident (Morris and Stevens 2014). While managing consumer perceptions of the shopping mall is very important, little research has been conducted on post-incident consumer behavior at shopping malls. The purpose of this exploratory research was to investigate consumers’ emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral responses to acts of gun violence at shopping malls. The research is grounded by the stimulus-organism-response framework (Mehrabian and Russell 1974) as well as the attitude-behavior connection (Ajzen and Fishbein 1977). Data were collected via an online questionnaire. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was utilized to recruit participants to complete the questionnaire. A total of 244 usable questionnaires were completed by U.S. consumers. The questionnaire contained four sections. Participants were first asked to respond to Likert-type scale items to assess their current intentions to visit their favorite shopping mall (Stoehl et al. 2004). In the second section of the questionnaire, participants read a fictional newspaper article about a shooting that recently occurred at their favorite shopping mall. The newspaper account was based on a collection of actual newspaper articles about recent mall shooting incidents. In the fictional newspaper article, the act of gun violence was described as being a random event in which one customer was killed by a gunman who later killed himself. After participants read the fictional newspaper article, they completed a semantic differential scale designed to assess their feelings of pleasure and arousal associated with visiting their favorite shopping mall following the shooting incident (Donovan et al. 1994). Next, participants were directed to respond to Likert-type scale items designed to assess their attitudes toward the mall following the shooting incident (Yoo and MacInnis 1998). Participants then responded to the same items from the first section of the questionnaire again to assess their post-incident intentions to visit the mall. Demographic information was collected in the fourth and final section of the questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses. The structural model exhibited a moderate, but acceptable, fit. Participants’ intention to visit the shopping mall following an act of gun violence was predicted by their attitudes toward the shopping mall. Although level of pleasure and level of arousal were both hypothesized to be emotional antecedents of consumers’ post-incident attitudes toward the shopping mall, only level of pleasure was significantly related to attitudes in the model. Hence, mall managers should perhaps try to emphasize the pleasurable aspects of the shopping mall to encourage consumers to re-patronize the mall following a shooting episode.