Do Emotions Bring Chinese Shoppers To A Mall?Role Of Self-congruence And Shopping Motivation

Chinese shoppers are adopting modern retailing formats increasingly.Shopping centers,mainly,have much attention of the retail market developers,leading to impressive progression in mall numbers since last few decades.Though,this economic development has benefited the investors in the form of high profitability and return on investment,which is encouraging for both local and international shopping mall investors and developers.The current study attempts to provide insights regarding Chinese's shopper's mall experience.The study explored how mall attributes:functionality,convenience,atmosphere,leisure,and safety dimensions contribute to induce positive emotions in customers during their visit to shopping mall.Also,it examined,what extent customer relate their self-images to the mall image by mall characteristics and how it strengthens the relationship between mall attributes and emotions.The moderating effect of shopping motivation was also tested to get a better understanding of underlying motives behind the shopping mall experiences.Besides,the impact of in mall evoked emotions on shopper's patronage behavior and re-patronage intentions was also tested.The data for this study was collected through mall intercept technique from the real-life mall shopper in "The MixC" shopping mall in Hefei,China.The study used four hundred and twenty useful survey questionnaires for the further statistical analysis.The findings indicate that most of the Chinese mall shoppers were young,qualified,and married.All the study constructs and measurement scales were found to be reliable and valid,including mall attributes and emotional dimensions,which were tested on Chinese sample for the first time.The primary analysis consists of exploratory factor analysis,and the confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)to test the measurement and structural model.This work extends the existing literature in various ways such as significant findings relate to the emotions felts during the shopping mall experience.Structural equation modeling was employed to test the goodness of fit and proposed hypothesis testing.The results of structural equation modeling revealed that mall functionality and convenience has a positive and significant association with emotion dimensions both pleasure and arousal.Mall atmosphere was found to have a positive and significant relationship with pleasure emotions;while on the other hand,mall atmospherics negatively influence shopper arousal emotions.Similarly,leisure/entertainment activities present at the shopping mall showed no significant relationship with pleasure emotions,whereas,leisure induced arousal emotions in shoppers.Pleasure and arousal together influenced shoppers' patronage behavior.However,only pleasure showed a positive and significant association with re-patronage intention;arousal showed no significant association with re-patronage intentions.Finally,the moderation results indicated that shopping motivation has a significant impact on pleasure and arousal.It is imperative for mall managers to provide both functional and recreational benefits to the shoppers.As customers with functional or task-oriented motives may enjoy the recreational shopping environment but shoppers with hedonic or leisure motive will quit the pure utilitarian environment.Some other interesting findings were related to the substantial impact of self-congruity on the relationship between the mall attributes and emotional states.Mall attributes make the overall image of the mall;shoppers tend to have pleasant shopping experiences when they find a match between their self-image and mall's image.Therefore,while establishing overall mall environment managers must consider the characteristics of the targeted segment by creating a match between shopper and mall image.The findings of this study,therefore,add ominously to shopper emotional dimensions,retailing,and consumer behavior literature,and also suggest some necessary implications for academic and market purposes.The study findings highlight some significant implications for shopping mall developers and managers in particular.It would be valuable to add emotion measures to future shopping mall experience model to examine whether and how their descriptive power can be improved.Future retail investigations should also inspect the role of emotions holistically by investigating the impact of personal emotions on consumer behavior in mall shopping settings.