Many incumbent retailers face increasing levels of competition from new retailers, some with advanced online and multi-channel offerings. How retailers compete on the basis of offering improved customer experiences to consumers is therefore increasingly important to the survival of different retailers.
Understanding why store designers propose new creations and why consumers may like new designs remains poorly understood in the marketing literature to date. Retailers have consequently few verifiable approaches to help them to confidently develop store atmospheres that produce approach behaviours.
Research by Dr. John Murray (Massey University, New Zealand), Professor Christoph Teller (Surrey University, UK) and Professor Jonathan Elms (Massey University) in the Journal of Marketing Management examines how consumers perceive store designs and the effectiveness of retailers’ efforts to create attractive store atmospheres.
Consumers visiting two stores of a large, rapidly growing European fashion retailer were surveyed to establish some of the ways that consumers perceive the introductions of new store designs across a store network. Comparisons were made between consumers’ perceptions of a recently remodelled fashion store and that of an older, established store prototype.
Our results show some of the processes that consumers use to incorporate new designs in their appraisals of store atmosphere, and that some consumers who place a greater value on the importance of design in their lives evaluate store designs differently from consumers with a lower design value orientation.
Out theoretical discussion and empirical findings reveal:
- the role of design variables in consumers’ in-store behaviours; and
- consumers appraisals of new store designs and atmospheres.
The practical benefit arising from this research is to assist retail managers by developing an approach that examines the effectiveness of retail design strategies, summarised in improvements to consumers’ perceptions of store atmospherics and higher levels of store approach behaviours.
More research related to this topic can be found on the authors’ own websites (see links below) and of course in the Journal of Marketing Management
Read the original research article: Murray, J., Teller, C. & Elms, J. (2019). Examining store atmosphere appraisals using parallel approaches from the aesthetics literature. Journal of Marketing Management, 35(9-10) 916-939. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2019.1618365
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