Research On Consumer's Patronage Intention To Shopping Street: An Experience Perspective

Since the 1990s, It rises of a nationwide boom to improve or construct shopping streets. Many of shopping streets naturally evolved are improved by government or real estate agents. However, poor performance appears that many shopping streets even turn to degressive traffic and sales.On the other hand, handing out with friends, eat, sightseeing are motives for more and more consumers rather than buying. Retailers also realize assortment is not the only means of attracting consumers besides satisfying consumers'mental and emotional experience. Shopping street is attractive, from the perspective of consumer behavior, consumers' willingness to choose this street and they will often patronage in the future .It concerns by retail drawing power and store choice theories.Retail drawing power observes the probability of some chosen retail facility from the consumer behavior perspective. But It neglects the role of consumer in the selection process based on homogeneity assumption to explain unclearly consumers'choices about retail center (Bucklin, 1971). With the retail image research, scholars begin to explore retail facilities from consumers cognitive perspective (Martineau, Pierre, 1958; Lindquist, 1974-75; Ken Osamu Kojima, 1977).In retail image theory, consumers are just taken as awareness dominators and it ignores some important issues such as, the shopping experience, personal emotions perception and shopping needs (Tamura Masanori, 1980).Compared with retail image theory, retailing patronage research focuses on consumer decision-making process and explores antecedents of retail patronage (Pan and Zilkhan, 2006) based on rational people assumption. with the premise of consumer patronage motivation, emotion of consumers comes to another stream of retailing research and consumer experience, with consistency of understanding or interpreting consumer behavior from consumer behavior perspective .Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) pointed out consumption activities were actually contains fantasy, feeling and fun activities and developed a comprehensive theoretical framework, taking consumer behavior as three stages input - reaction system-behavior output. They proposed the fundamental thought of consumer experience.Following the thought of consumer experience, consumer behaviors like shopping is interaction between consumers and retail environment. So does environment psychology. One of the determine issues in environment psychology is the mediating role of cognition and affect between environment stimulus and human behavior. The S-O-R model proposed by Mehrabian and Russell was to be noted in 1974.There are essential differences between shopping street and some retail store.Here they comes: shopping street offers assortments beyond stores in order to satisfy consumers relative purchase.Besides, as the public space of city, shopping street is where people come to socialization and cultural activities happen. Shopping street is also an important role of urban landscape, one of its basic utility is to satisfy consumers shopping ,leisure and entertainment needs.Based on the differences above, the behavior to shopping street needs to explain in new sight.The essence of consumers'behavioral intention to shopping street is interaction between consumers and retailing environment. S-O-R model can be used to interpret it. To be noted, the model often focused on the response in the literature, such as the effects of feelings or emotions to consumer behavior. But, emotional reaction of environmental stimuli was not enough to explain the consumers shopping experience activities, because shopping activity itself can bring consumers the joyful feeling and utility, consumer experience also contains consumption value (Mathwick et al., 2002). Besides, in the store environment literature, researchers have done little effort on perceived customer value, and concerns to utility value (e.g., commodity value) ignoring hedonic value.Therefore, S-O-R model (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974) is the main framework to explore behavioral intention with the experience , specifying consumers cognition process with affect state and perceived hedonic value. Our framework is that three fators of shopping street environment as antendents, mediation role of mood and intention as dependent variable.Chongqing Road and Guilin Road are chosen to be examined in Changchun. The total sample size is 500, either road takes a half. The respond rate is 94.8%. After questionnaire adjustment, SPSS 16.0 and LISREL 8.51 as analysis tool, at first, test constructs'normality following reliability and validity analysis. Then structural equation modeling is used to verify measurement model and hypothesis testing. The final data analysis results are as follows.First, consumers shopping experience is the determinant of consumer behavior intention, mood and hedonic value are important factors of behavioral intentions besides hedonic value mediates mood and behavioral intention.Second, the three elements (social factor, atmosphere and design factor) positively affect mood and have differential path coefficients. Atmosphere that non-visual perception of shopping street seems to be the most important factor to mood.Third, data analysis results also show two new paths, namely, social factors directly relations hedonic value, atmosphere factor and behavioral intentions directly influence between entities. Social factors influences perceived hedonic value in two ways, one is direct , the other is indirect by the mediation of mood. Hence, it shows mood is partial mediation. Similarly, the atmosphere affects consumers' behavioral intention is directly influence and indirect impact, as the latter, mood and hedonic value are mediate variables.Fourth, S-O-R cannot provide theoretical support to the additional two significant results. It is conclude that it can be explained with the western theory, but the conclusion is too limited, Chinese culture and social economic situation help to form the uniqueness of consumer psychology which western theories fail to explain.This research also has some contributions. It proves hedonic value is an important cognitive variable to environment beyond to the traditional quality /price tradeoff perspective. The result solves the shortcoming of S-O-R model which can not explain consumer experience well for only focusing on affect as the response. Different from other studies, the study turns to shopping street as research context instead of products, service or stores and tests the S-O-R model in China, taking another explanation to multi-purpose shopping bahavior and recreational shopping.The relevant domestic studies are rare. The paper confirms Baker (1996) for retail environment analysis theory in Chinese context by the framework to intention and it measures shopping street environment.Previous research rarely discussed mood's effect, this study confirms the consumer mood state as mediation variable between the physical environment and consumers' behavioral intention, that is a new thinking space for mood research.Structural equation modeling method can correct measurement of deviation and realize multiple linear estimated to deal with the relationship between variables, this research is effective attempt in shopping center.Hence, the implementations are following:Developers must ensure a superior hedonic value that give shoppers the reason to come to enjoy a good time and linger in the shopping center for longer periods of time.When designing or improving shopping streets, managers and developers need to consider tenant mix, entertainment facilities and equipment, but also must pay attention to the traffic, the hardware facilities etc.The atmosphere is responsibility of all the business owners. Managers and developers can claim it or can be implemented by owners themselves.Finally, this research limitations and future research directions are as follows: I used a convenient sample drawn in two shopping centers in Changchun. Although the sample characteristics seem to represent typical shopper in this northeaster city, whether the results can be generalized to other cities China or other parts of the world is an open question.This is a cross-sectional study, the relationships revealed among the model constructs are associations. Causal directions, while theoretically derived, should be drawn with caution.