Mall Attractiveness Factors In Terms Of Different Shopping Involvements

Consumer' mall image is a decisive factor of mall attractiveness.Different consumers have their own cognition on the attractiveness.High-involved consumers(i.e.shopping lovers)and low-involved consumers(non shopping lovers)possibly use their respective image components to assess attractiveness.However,few researches probe into the formation of different consumer's agglomeration attractiveness factors and the variation of their impact on attractiveness.If the managers are able to apprehend what specific factors in the mall will draw attention of each consumer group,they will find the chance to improve the mall characteristics according to consumer's point of interest.In doing so,they can enhance the mall attractiveness and retain consumers.Studies on the impacts of attractiveness need to measure mall image.However,the existing research fails to provide a well applied image scale,due to the misspecification of formative indexes on a reflective model.If the researchers begin with the study on mall image formation and explore important perceptual cues,they should be able to measure mall image with a formative model.The main issues of the research are as follows.what information will finally come out as the important perceptive cues that form the image of a mall? How should the mall image be scientifically measured? are there any differences of the aforesaid effects between the high-involved and low-involved consumers?Information processing of human beings are classified into two categories according to dual processing theory.One is the piece-meal process in which people deliberately process the information directly related to the judgments.The other is initiating the schema in the brain based on the indirect information with the help of memory.Which of the above ways to choose depends on people's relevant knowledge and involvement,i.e.the importance of the related issue.The richer the relevant knowledge and the higher the involvement,the greater possibility that people will take the first route,named central route.Otherwise,people are inclined to take the second route,named peripheral route.Many of the cues in a mall can be used to evaluate attractiveness of the mall.Since high-involved consumers who are indulged in shopping always have adequate knowledge and experience in judging the value of merchandise,they are likely to use the central route,by which they evaluate the attractiveness with the information related to products and service.On the contrary,the low-involved consumers possibly use the information less related to product and service to assess the mall attractiveness.Based upon the above supposition,I started from the analysis of 2000 shopping mall online reviews,using text analytic tool Nvivo 10.0.155 major perceptive cues of mall image were acquired and upon which I tentatively developed formative mall image scale.The formative scale is different from a reflective one in terms of causal structure and the image scale in this research was composed of 20 indexes in four dimensions,namely functionality,leisure,environment and convenience,with high reliability and validity.Then the scale was used in exploring the relations among mall image,attractiveness and shopping involvement.The data of 1029 convenience samples were collected and analyzed with Partial Least Square SEM on software Smart PLS2.0.The findings are as follows.First,from the result of all consumer data analysis,the four dimensions of mall image have significant correlations with attractiveness.Second,the functionality's impact on attractiveness is much stronger than impact of leisure,environment and convenience.Third,for high-involved consumers,leisure has an insignificant effect on low-involved consumers.Last,the functionality image of extremely high-involved consumers have higher impact on attractiveness than that of low-involved consumers.The findings show that the consumers are likely to use the product and service cues to evaluate the attractiveness and that is particularly true for the highly involved consumers,who are the most important customers to the mall.The first theoretical implication is applying dual process theory into the research on the attractiveness factors.It reveals the formation of image and emphasizes the importance of perceptive cues in attractiveness evaluation,which conforms to the law of cognition.The combination of image formation mechanism and conglomeration attractiveness evaluation model enriches the retail attraction theory.Next,the shopping involvements were added to the mall attractiveness model as a moderator justifies the explanation of the relation between mall image and attractiveness.More importantly,the enduring shopping involvements was considered a variable of consumer's characteristics and the high-involved consumers are potential clients to the shopping mall.The findings help the practitioners to understand what cues will be perceived by them and will finally affect the mall attractiveness,and what they should do to retain those valuable customers.In addition,the development of formative mall image scale contributes to solving long existent issues of model misspecification.The formative measure facilitates the alignment between the conceptualization and operationalization of retail image and provide researchers with a brand new tool of measurement.The managerial implication of the study is to express disagreement with the prevailing practice of excessively developing food and entertainment projects in shopping malls.Although leisure cues have some impact on mall attractiveness,the impact is much weaker than the functionality cues do.Therefore,the manager should think more about the conversion of the leisure attracted customer flow to the retail shops than simply relentlessly developing leisure facilities,and at the same time,explore the potential functionality cues to effectively enhance the mall attractiveness.Finally,managers can manipulate the consumer conglomeration image through proper strategies to change the physical and marketing characteristics of the mall based on the important perceptive cues acquired in the study.As a result,they can make the use of limited resources to build or remodel the mall for the purpose of increasing its drawing power and sales revenue.