An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Store Image And Loyalty

It is an important way of building up the customer loyalty to pursue the advantages in market competition for modern retailing. The store image could have a remarkable effect on customers'decision makings, and even lead to the origin of selection in retailers when the commodities and the services supplied by them are homogeneous. For the being time, there still exist disagreements in the foreign studies about the relation between the store image and the customer loyalty. However, it stops at a surficial extent when it falls within the domestic studies on the field mentioned above.This paper, with the purpose of solving the present problems in retailing industry of our country and filling the lack of theoretical studies in the above field with the findings of this research, has established a theoretical model on the relation between the store image and the customer loyalty. The model is on the basis of the Theory of Consumers'Behavior, Customer Loyalty Theory, Trust Theory and Store Image Theory, and treats the customer satisfaction and customer trust as the media variables. This paper tries to cause a heuristic argument exploring the relation between the store image and customer loyalty within the framework in four dimensions of cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty and action loyalty. Then it develops the local scale which is suitable for use under the background of Chinese culture. Besides that, a survey has been carried out in six different cities such as Beijing, and Chengdu. In this way, this paper pool 803 samples and further the study in data analyzing.The empirical study shows that the self-developed scale has a good reliability and validity. The findings also illustrates that the store image could directly affect the cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty and action loyalty. And besides that, it also can indirectly influence the cognitive loyalty and affective loyalty through the media variables of customer satisfaction and customer trust. However, it is found that the customer satisfaction and customer trust have no direct effect on conative loyalty and action loyalty. At the same time, the causality among the multi-dimensional loyalty is supported by the findings of the empirical study, which further interprets the complicate causality chain of the variables.