Abstract
Currently, sustainability emerges as a key element on which the development of competitive advantages for businesses is based. In the dynamic and turbulent environment in which retail companies operate, sustainable practices are posited as an opportunity for their progress and survival. Through this article, it is intended to advance the nature and dimensions of this construct and examine its influence on store equity and consumer satisfaction. Furthermore, this work analyses the moderating effect of gender on these variables and the mediating nature of brand equity in the development of consumer satisfaction. All this is developed through a quantitative study carried out on a sample of 510 consumers of different food retail commercial formats (hypermarkets, supermarkets, and discount stores) in Spain. The technique used for data analysis is partial least squares (PLS) regression. The results show the importance of sustainability and brand equity in the development of consumer satisfaction in the retail sector, with the intensity of its effects being a gender issue. On the other hand, brand equity is positioned as a key element thanks to its mediating effect between sustainability and satisfaction. All of this points to the need to move towards more sustainable business models.
Highlights
Given the importance of the social function and the employment generated by the retail trade, it is a strategic sector for the Spanish economy
Regarding the average variance extracted, all the constructs of the structural model obtain values greater than 0.5, which implies that each factor explains at least 50% of the variance of the assigned indicators [88]
The results obtained show that the square root of the average variance extracted (AVE) is higher than the estimated correlation between the factors, which appears below the diagonal of the matrix, corroborating the discriminant validity
Summary
Given the importance of the social function and the employment generated by the retail trade, it is a strategic sector for the Spanish economy. Service of the Department of Economics of the Spanish Confederation of Business Organisations (CEOE) in 2019 underline the major relevance of the retail sector in Spain, where more than 750,000 retail companies are located, representing 13% of the national economy They account for 17% of the country’s total employment, positioning retail as the largest sector to generate employment. Its determining role is even greater today due to the immense changes that are taking place in the global economy and that are directly reflected in the retail sector, where digitisation and globalisation play a prominent role These two factors, together with the evolution in consumer habits, energetically drive the profound transformation process in the Spanish commercial sector, which has taken an unexpected turn due to the COVID-19 crisis. All these elements lead the retail sector to the inescapable need to reinvent itself if it wants to continue competing efficiently in this unsettled and turbulent environment [1]
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