A Study On Effect Of Crowding On Emotion And Behavior Of Consumer In General Merchandized Store

With the development of retailing in China, General Merchandise Stores (GMS) have been shed light on since introduced into China in later 1990's. In recently years, the GMS has taken place of the traditional Department Store and become the most vigorous retailing form in China. More and more researchers began to study on the retailing environment that was regarded having a great impact on retail shopping behavior. These kinds of researches haven't been conducted much in China while western researchers have studied from 1970's. A significant factor of environment—retail crowding has never been paid attention to by Chinese researchers. But may westerners think that the eastern can stand the retail crowing of high level and the retail crowding can even stimulate they buying desire.This thesis is an empirical study of the behavior of Chinese consumers in GMS. It is a cooperative research conducted by Donghua University and Aubura University (U.S.A). Based on the Eroglu-Harrell Retailing Crowding Model (EH Model ). this research tries to study the behavior of consumers from a new angle—emotion. In the meantime, we want to validate and renew the relationship between perception of crowding on Chinese consumer's emotion and behavior in GMS and offer suggestion and advice for GMS retailers to make effective marketing strategies.Shanghai Century Lianhua was chosen as a GMS representative to conduct a questionnaire survey. What we want to explore and validate through this study is as follows:1. How many internal or external factors will influence consumer's perception of crowding of in GMS?2. Whether perception of crowding has direct influence on consumer's evaluation on store image, satisfaction and purchasing behavior?3. Whether and how perception of crowding will influence the emotions of consumers?4. How emotion will influence consumer behavior and evaluations directlv orthrough emotion?Our research results reveal that crowding expectation and crowding tolerance are the most important internal factors having effect on perception of crowding. In all the external factors of store display, zone of packaged product has significant influence on perception of spatial crowding while zone of aisle table and frozen food/meat/dairy product and vegetable have significant influence on perception of human crowding. Register areas, ceiling and lighting have marked influence on both. Human crowding has more significant influence on overall perception of crowding than spatial crowding. Overall perception of crowding affects consumer's evaluation and purchasing behavior through emotion (pleasure, arousal and dominant). Finally, different consumer behavior was significantly affected by three kinds of emotion.