Exposition Evaluation and Emotions Leading To City Image and Extra Spending

Abstract

Abundant research on impulse buying exists both in traditional and virtual retailing environments. The investigation of consistency, however, receives insufficient attention. Targeting a Taiwanese retail store offering both online and offline services, this paper employs the environmental psychology approach and examines how external stimuli, namely, merchandise variety, service quality, atmospherics, and price affect differently consumer’s positive and negative emotions, triggering impulse buying behaviors across retail environments. By classifying stimuli into insignificant, basic, performance, and delighter dimensions based on their effect on emotions, the results reveal that both online and offline consumers perceive price as a delighter. In contrast, merchandise variety and service quality play a trivial role in the online context, whereas they represent a performance item, and a basic item, respectively in the offline context. Atmospherics denote a performance item in online retailing, but indicate a delighter in offline retailing. Atmospherics also have larger impact on negative emotions online than offline. Furthermore, both positive and negative emotions lead to impulse buying in either retail setting. Negative emotions, however, have greater impact on impulse buying online than offline.