Abstract
Various developments continually pressurise retailers to find new and innovative ways to differentiate themselves from competitors and adapt to ever-changing and accelerating environmental circumstances. Positioning based on customers’ in-store shopping experience (ISE) offers retailers an alternative means of differentiation and is achieved by providing a superior in-store shopping experience. The ISE instrument that has been developed to measure customers’ in store shopping experience is used in this study to compare the in-store shopping experiences of customers of two diverse retailing environments (supermarkets versus clothing retailers) by assessing its impact on customer retention. A proposition is formulated and the findings reported. The implications of ISE and customer retention for retail managers are also dealt with.
Highlights
During the past two decades retailers have had to deal with increasingly more sophisticated and demanding customers, new and often unanticipated competition from both domestic and foreign sources and a wave of new technological advances
We suggest that the in-store shopping experience is a multi-dimensional construct and argue that multiple in-store experiences over time ‘cascade’ to an overall or cumulative assessment we term in-store shopping experience
Based on the work of Dabholkar et al (1996) and Vásquez et al (2001) we developed a measuring instrument that overcomes the limitations of earlier attempts to measure the perceptions of the in-store shopping experiences of customers
Summary
During the past two decades retailers have had to deal with increasingly more sophisticated and demanding customers, new and often unanticipated competition from both domestic and foreign sources and a wave of new technological advances. These and other developments exert continuous pressure on retailers to find new and innovative ways to differentiate themselves from competitors and adapt to ever-changing and accelerating environmental circumstances (Dabholkar, Thorpe & Rentz, 1996:3). Retailers’ attempts to differentiate themselves vary from efforts to compete on superior service quality to loyalty schemes. The large number of customer loyalty schemes operated by retailers is evidence of this challenging situation. Most of the differentiation attempts have, produced limited success (Egan, 1999; Sopanen, 1996; Berry 1986; Hummel & Savitt, 1988; Reichheld & Sasser, 1990; Dabholkar et al, 1996)
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