DO THE DIFFERENT STORE FORMATS OF THE SAME BRAND MATTER TO CHINESE SHOPPERS? A STUDY ON A JAPANESE FASHION BRAND

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Despite the plethora of articles and research in marketing and retailing literatures focused on enhancing customer loyalty, the topic of how to best allocate resources to various loyalty-building efforts has always attracted interest from both academics and practitioners (Kamran-Disfani, et al., 2017). Much research has examined that satisfaction is a strong relative factor of loyalty. However, Kumar, et al. (2012) and Kamran-Disfani, et al. (2017) stressed that the satisfaction-loyalty link could depend on various moderators and mediators. And they pointed out the difference between two types of loyalty—attitudinal and behavioral, and the mediating effect of attitudinal loyalty within the satisfaction-behavioral loyalty link. Thus, there is a need for more studies empirically investigating the satisfaction-loyalty link and how satisfaction effects loyalty in different contexts. On the other hand, many companies have recently been building a greater variety of store formats and attempting to provide a superior shopping experience through their stores in order to increase the possibility of customer revisitation and customer loyalty. Also, consumers not only switch to different retailers in the same product categories but also change to different store formats for the same product purchasing (Anand and Sinha, 2009). The reasons can be considered as customers’ attitudes toward stores and preference of store atmosphere and environment (Wakefield and Baker, 1998). However, few research pays attention to the issue of how, and to what extent, the different store formats have on impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty building. This is especially true of retailers having entered a new overseas market, and how its loyalty building is effected by its store format choice during its developing stages. This study adopts a conceptual model from Kamran-Disfani, et al. (2017) and aims to examine the satisfaction-loyalty link and test if attitudinal loyalty could be a mediator between satisfaction and behavioral loyalty. And if so, do store formats matter to the satisfaction-loyalty link. In short, we develop hypotheses of how store atmosphere, customer satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty, behavioral loyalty are related, and how store format moderates these relationships. In order to improve the understanding of the satisfaction-loyalty link in the context of retail internationalization, we survey a Japanese fashion company — Nice Claup who segmented the Chinese market by operating multiple retail stores, and each retail store plays a discrete role of cultivating customer loyalty. In our analysis, we compare two store formats of Nice Claup, which are the single brand specialty store and the multi-brand store (defined as ―house brand store‖ in this paper). House brand stores aim to offer novel shopping experiences by gathering several Japanese fashion brands into one large store, with each brand having their own detached areas for keeping each brand’s identity separate and recognizable, but are connected to each other by an integrated store design. Both of these two types of stores are named ―Nice Claup‖, and operated by the same retailer. We choose a 388-customer survey data as our sample. All of these customers have purchased clothes at Nice Claup’s stores over 5 times per year and have been given special member’s card by Nice Claup in Shanghai, China. This 388-customer data obtains 180 consumers who always purchase at house brand stores, and 208 consumers who always purchase at single-brand specialty stores. Hypotheses are tested using an ordinary least squares regression model with a cross-store format comparative analysis. The results suggest that while attitudinal loyalty positively and directly influences behavioral loyalty, satisfaction indirectly drives behavioral loyalty through the mediating effects of attitudinal loyalty. This implies that we should focus on the process of building loyalty and there might be a potential stage before gaining customers’ behavioral loyalty. We also find that there are some important differences between the two store formats, i.e., (1) the effect of store atmosphere (ambience cue, design cue, social cue (Kumar and Kim, 2014)) on satisfaction; (2) the moderating effect of store formats on the relationship between attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. The findings explore different perception of the two types of stores and influencing factor on building loyalty from an emerging market perspective. By extension, it also shows an application of implementing retail internationalization with adopting multiple store formats on different developing stages, and customer loyalty can be enhanced by offering store novelty in the Chinese market.