The Antecedents of in-Store Experience: Experimental Study

Abstract

Understanding consumers and their consumption experience of products, services and brands in both retailing and online environment is one of the main tasks of marketing. Therefore the purpose of this research is to investigate the circumstances of in-store experiences in hyper star markets that have been evaluated under the main hypothesis “shopping motives, store environment and employee characteristics are circumstances that influence in-store experiences. This study was a qualitative one that was conducted as an experiential study using Islamic Azad University who had been chosen through stratified random sampling relevant to the size. 2560 questionnaires were distributed in different universities of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz in February and March in 2015 and 2510 questionnaires were returned. Also to analyze research data non-parametric statistical methods have been used. In this research to describe data descriptive statistics and to analyze data and test research hypotheses inferential statistics and structural equation modeling have been used, respectively. For this purpose SPSS and LISRE software has been used. With respect to the fact that it is a multilevel model in order to confirm the model and respond to the hypotheses structural equation modeling with partial least square (PLS) has been employed using SMARTPLS software. Finally, according to the findings of this study (1) when sales staff are women the means of customers’ sensory/affective/cognitive experience is more than the time when sales staff are men; (2) it became apparent that experience-based shopping motives influenced sensory and affective experience and product-based shopping motives affected cognitive experience respectively; (3) it became apparent that store brightness had the most effect on sensory experience and arrangement influenced sensory and affective experience but these two factors didn’t  influence cognitive influence. (4) finally it became apparent that employee physical attractiveness and cheerfulness influenced each of three in-store experiences but employee helpfulness didn’t affect employee affective and cognitive experience.