The moderating role of personal culture on the relationship between retail brand personality and shoppers’ loyalty: An evidence of supermarkets in Vietnam

Nguyen Le Thai Hoa

doi:10.32508/stdjelm.v3i4.574

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the most common trends in retail industry research is the attribution of human characteristics or traits to retail brands. The term “retail brand personality or retailer personality” was born with various definitions and measurement scales from different cultures. Therefore, this paper aims are (i) to develop retail brand personality measurement scale tailor-made for general supermarkets, the most popular retail format in Vietnam, (ii) to measure the impact of retail brand personality dimensions on shoppers’ loyalty, and (iii) to investigate the moderating effects of personal cultural orientations on these relationships. The scale was developed through two stages: Item generation and item purification with the collected data on quota sampling of 403 shopping-goers, and then analyzed by SEM and MSEM method (Moderated structural equation modeling).The results indicated that retail brand personality consisted of four dimensions: Reliability, Sophistication, Modern, and Family-oriented, significantly found to impact on shoppers’ loyalty, in which Sophistication and Reliability were the strongest. More interestingly, the moderating role of personal cultural orientations in these regards was greatly identified. Particularly, shoppers with high independence culture highly appreciated the relationship between Sophistication and Modern dimensions and shoppers’ loyalty whereas shoppers with high Interdependence culture only supported for the impact of Reliability on loyalty. However, both personal culture orientations were found not be significantly related directly to the loyalty. The findings may help retailers and marketers come up with more effective marketing solutions in terms of enhancing symbolic values for their retail brands and adjust their integrated marketing and communication activities accordingly. This paper has a significant contribution of exploring the moderating role of personal cultural orientations on the relationship between retail brand personality and shoppers’ loyalty by the new analysis methodology - MSEM.

Highlights

With the population of more than 100 million, retail market in Vietnam is very potential but the competition is strong with the advent of new retail formats, together with the arrival of giant foreign retailers 1
10 in-depth interviews were conducted with semistructured questions to develop the scale of retail brand personality, re-evaluate the measurement scale of loyalty, Independence and Interdependence, and explore the influence of personality or independence/interdependence in personal culture on customer loyalty
exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Cronbach Alpha analysis was run to test the reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of customer loyalty and two personal cultural orientations and the results indicated that three variables met the requirements

Summary

Introduction

With the population of more than 100 million, retail market in Vietnam is very potential but the competition is strong with the advent of new retail formats, together with the arrival of giant foreign retailers 1. According to Floor (2006): “To survive in the current tough retail environment and to create sustainable development, retailers must have effective strategies to differentiate themselves from rival, achieve customers’ loyalty, and gain long-term benefits” 3.retail ers should build an outstanding brand for themselves in shoppers’ mind as retail differentiation cannot be achieved without branding. Human personality characteristics or traits are often attributed to retail brand s due to its important role in perceived differentiation, satisfaction, patronage, attachment, and loyalty behavior 6–10. Retail brand personality influences consumers’ behavior: trust 11–13, attachment 11,12, commitment 12, satisfaction 14, attitude 4,12,13, and shopping value and patronage intension 15. Retail brand personality is an sustainable competitive advantage for retailers since it is a powerful tool to position and differentiate a retailer from its competitors 17. Consumers are likely to choose brands whose personalities match their own 3,18, to

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