The Study Of The Impact Of Customers' Experience On Store Loyalty

Since becoming a member of the WTO in 2002, China gradually canceled the rules which restricted the overseas investment proportion and quantity of new stores. From then on, our country opens to the foreign retail trade entirely. This brings great threats to the native department stores, while there are more and more competitions between them. Facing the increasing competition, what should department stores do to retain customers, create customer loyalty and make money continuously? I believe this is the core problem which the managers of native department stores are thinking about everyday.Under the globalization background, it is the era for the Experience Economy in the 21st century. Consumers pay more attention to the great pleasures and nice experiences when buying products instead of to commodities and services. So have the scholars and the managers paid enough attention to the customer experience in the department stores? Have they ever considered increasing the store loyalty by providing good customer experience? Unfortunately the answer is not so satisfying after reading relatively materials. What's more, the current studies about store loyalty driven factors mainly focus on the functional factors, such as perceived service quality, service contact and so on, but not so much attention to the non-functional factors, for example the customer experience.So, in this case, this study will discuss the influence of every dimension of the Experiential Marketing to customer satisfaction and store loyalty, and then find out proper approaches for the department stores to increase store loyalty and to get a better profit.This study is conducted with empirical research methods. Its objectives are to test the effectiveness of the Experience Marketing, and to discuss the influence of the Experience Marketing to the customer loyalty. Managers, especially in the department stores, can extract useful information from this study to develop marketing policies and competition strategies. Questionnaire survey method is used in this study. Samples come from the consumers who have consumed in the Shuang'an Department Store recently. Totally 500 samples were collected and in which 461 samples are valid. The statistical software SPSS13.0 and LISREL7.8 are used in the analysis procedure. The research methods in the analysis procedure include descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, validity analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, second-order factor analysis and structural equation model.This study uses descriptive analysis to describe the customers'experience results which include 7 experience dimensions. Those are Merchandise quality, Merchandise variety, Store environment, Personal interaction, Complaint handling, Store facility and Store name. Customer satisfaction and store loyalty are described here too. And then the validity of 7 dimensions is tested through the second-order factor analysis method. Structural equation model is used to test the influences of the observed variables to their own potential variables, and most important, the influences of 7 dimensions to the customer satisfaction and store loyalty. The results of the path coefficient analysis above are very useful for the managers of department stores in the real business world.The study finds that merchandise quality, merchandise variety, store environment, personal interaction, store facility and store name significantly and positively influence customer satisfaction; merchandise quality, merchandise variety, store facility and store name significantly and positively influence store loyalty directly. What's more, merchandise quality, merchandise variety, store environment, personal interaction, store facility and store name significantly and positively influence store loyalty indirectly through customer satisfaction. Finally, customer satisfaction significantly and positively influences store loyalty which is the same as other scholars have found.From the whole analytic results, Merchandise variety occupies the biggest percentage among the positive influences. The managers of department stores should attach great importance to it. The other aspects including merchandise quality, store environment, personal interaction, store facility and store name should be also paid attention to.