The Correlation between Enclosure and Customer’s Response

Abstract

There is a change in store design that is widely used by brands to sell their products. Brands that use temporary store is no longer integrating any boundaries to separate the store from the environment around them. The existence of boundaries relates to the spatial quality of the store, which ultimately has a relation to the response of customers. The new trend of retail shows that enclosure is no longer needed to accommodate shopping experience. Unfortunately, there is still limited literature that studies the enclosure of the store as a spatial quality in a store environment. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between the enclosure of a store environment and the customer’s shopping experience. This paper also extends the research related to the store’s spatial quality and its relation to the customers. A literature review was conducted to further investigate the relationship between enclosure as the store’s spatial quality, product engagement, and customer responses. This study features three store simulation videos with three different types of enclosure (4 walls, 2 walls, 0 wall) and two sets of questionnaires to study the customer’s behavior. We interviewed 163 respondents from the age range of 19-35 in this study. The results indicate that the store with no enclosure encourages the customer to stay longer compared to the store with an enclosure. These findings can later be used as consideration for retail designers to develop their stores.