An Analysis on the Effect of Supermarket

An Analysis on the Effect of Supermarket
Experiential Marketing Impacting Customer Loyalty
SHAO Guirong1, LIANG Jian2
1. School of Economics and Management, University of Shaoxing, China, 312000
2. School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang Sci-tech University, China, 310018
[email protected]
Abstract: with questionnaire survey on supermarket and combining SPSS statistical software, this
paper empirically to presents the factors for experiential marketing impacting the customer loyalty,
verified the relationship between experiential marketing and customer loyalty and built a customer
loyalty model. The implementation of the supermarket experiential marketing and the statistical analysis
on the questionnaire regarding customer satisfaction have concluded that emotional experience, thinking
experience, action experience and interaction experience impact positively the customer emotional
loyalty while emotional experience, thinking experience and action experience impact positively the
customer behavioral loyalty. Besides, there is a positive relationship between the emotional loyalty and
behavioral loyalty.
Keywords: Supermarkets, experiential marketing, Customer Loyalty, Impact Analysis
1. Introduction
Along with the approaching of the economic experiential era, many foreign retailers have prepared or
are preparing to make full use of all means of experiential marketing to improve their management level
so as to enhance the customer loyalty. In respect to the related Chinese and international researches,
there are roughly two areas as follows:
Firstly, researches are involved in the impact of customer experience on customer loyalty.
Oliver (l999) studied and found that experiential behavior would present significant explanatory power
on the customer loyalty; Berry (2000), while creating his “service brand equity model”, particularly
emphasized the key role of consumer experience impacting the building of service brand equity and
loyalty; Chiara Gentile Nicola Spiller and Giuliano Noci(2007) researched to show that the
experiencing would play a fundamental role first in the determination of customer preferences and then
in the decision of their purchases; Chang H H and Chen S W(2008) believed that experiencing would
be the important variables to understand the consumer behavior since it would be positively related in
behavior to further patronage.
Mano & Oliver (1997) believed that emotional experience would play a positive influence on
satisfaction, which would be related to word of mouth, whereas experiences of enjoyment and practical
perception would jointly impact the consumer satisfaction behavior; Babin (2005), etc., found that the
experiencing value would present positively correlated to retail preferences and further patronage
intention.
It is not difficult to find that although there are no exactly the same conclusions contributed by Chinese
and foreign researches on the impacting paths of customer experience on the customer loyalty, it has
been generally agreed that the customer experience would present a direct effect on customer loyalty.
Secondly, researches are involved in the impact of customer loyalty on customer experience.
Tse & wilton(1998) believed that a unique motivation for loyal customers is that such loyal customers
would share their maintenance and repair of their psychological balance when they could perceive an
experience different from their previous experience standards. S. Fournier (1998) believed that loyal
consumers would explain assess the new information using their prejudice and mindset based on their
existing experience as standards. According to the researches made by BoRon, Kannan & Bramlett etc.,
for a number of companies implementing customer loyalty programs, their loyal customers would
neglect both positive and negative experiences because unswerving loyalists would not change their
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purchasing attitude even when experiencing the negative effects. New research made by Tracy Meyer
(2008) has shown that when a customer has a high degree of loyalty, the negative consumer experience
has lesser effect on the attitude of their further patronage of the related store. Such psychological
balance mechanism facing the negative consumer experiences has a guiding influence on our research
on the impact of experiential marketing on brand loyalty.
The above reviewed and commented literature have shown that most of the literature researching on the
customer experience and loyalty has focused mainly on the positive effect of customer experience
impacting the customer loyalty. While regarding the path of experience impacting the customer loyalty,
although there have been some scholars’ researches related to the negative experience effect impacting
the loyalty and the retroaction of customer loyalty onto the consumption experience and result, it is still
lack of enough concern on the whole. The present paper aims at, by holding the empirical investigation
on the supermarket experiential marketing impacting the customer loyalty, the analysis and definition of
the measurement dimensions and then the empirical exploration of the relationship between the two.
2. Modeling and Research Design
2.1 Modeling
Liang Jianai (2007) interviewed with customers of small-scale supermarket and discussed from the
practice the general factors impacting the customer loyalty of supermarket chain and the measuring
dimensions for customer loyalty were divided into customer attitude loyalty and customer behavior
loyalty, which were measured by four item indicators. For factors impacting the customer loyalty of
supermarket chain were divided, according to the nature of the role, into 5 factors like
customer-perceived quality, customer-perceived value, customer satisfaction, customer sense of trust
and switching cost. Accordingly, we’ve proposed a conceptual model of supermarket experiential
marketing impacting the customer loyalty.
Sensory Experience
Emotional Loyalty
Emotional Experience
Customer Loyalty
Thinking Experience
Action Experience
Behavior Loyalty
Interaction
Fig.1: Relationship Model of the Present Research
In order to analyze and discuss the relationship model proposed, the present paper has applied
questionnaire designed into a structured one to obtain relevant information of which the data collected
has been described finally.
2.2 Research Design
2.2.1 Designing of Questionnaire
The questionnaire is divided into two parts, of which Part-I is the basic information of consumers while
Part-II includes 25 items of questions of 5 Dimensions for customer experience effect and 10 items of
questions of two dimensions for customer loyalty measurement. All the items in the questionnaire,
except for Part-I, have adopted the Likert five-point scale requiring respondents to fulfill the related
statements so that respondents could directly answer by selecting the appropriate choice that might
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shorten their thinking time for their answering to reduce respondents’ burden and increase the reliability
of answers. For every item, respondents were requested to judge the conformity described in the
questionnaire according to their actual shopping situation of supermarkets and fill out respectively using
“disagree”, “do not totally agree” “Generally agree”, “relatively speaking agree” and “agree”, which
have been given their value of “1”, “2”, “3”, “4” and “5” for the related data analysis.
Questionnaire sheets were mainly distributed into Hangcheng and Auchan supermarkets and randomly
into communities and respondents were requested to answer the items. The questionnaire sheets were
issued commencing from March 12, 2009 to March 16, 2009. The research survey used simple random
sampling method. Totally 100 questionnaires sheets were issued and 100 valid questionnaire ones were
revoked, whose response rate reached 100%.
2.2.2 Respondents’ Choice of their Shopping of Supermarkets
8%
20%
8%
16%
Wal-Mart
Wumart
Auchan
Century Lianhua
Tesco
Carrefour
Vanguard
Others
12%
12%
8%
16%
Fig. 2: Customers’ Choice of their Shopping of Supermarkets
Note 1: Data Sources: Based on derived data from survey questionnaire
Consumers presented choices of supermarkets on average, who mentioned all major supermarkets in
Hangcheng. Consumers’ principle would often choose the nearest supermarket. For supermarket
consumers, the most important is the discount prices, quality protection, etc. A supermarket which does
it better would be chosen by consumers for their supermarket shopping.
2.2.3 Analyzing Reliability of Questionnaire
The present research has applied the coefficient reliability proposed by RTCronbach (1951) to test the
reliability of the questionnaire. As can be seen from Table 1, the Alpha of the variable for this research is
larger than 0.900 (Nunnally, 1978) to show the better consistency of measurements.
Table 1: Analyzing Reliability of Questionnaire
Description
Reliability Coefficient
Implementing Experiential Marketing and Reliability
Coefficients of Supermarket Brand Loyalty
Sample
Item Number
Alpha
100
35
0.921
Note 1: Data Sources: Based on data from survey questionnaire, derived using Analysis of Validity SPSS13.0
This part firstly describes the design of the survey questionnaire and then uses reliability analysis to test
the quality of the obtained data. The result shows that the data under the research has better met the
needs of the present research and can be used for future research.
3. Empirically Analyzing Effect of Experiential Marketing on Customer Loyalty
The previous part has tested the quality of the collected data under the present research. This part will
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focus on the relationship between variables by using appropriate statistical methods to analyze
empirically the relationship between experiential marketing and customer loyalty.
Table 2: Cross-tab for Whether Customers Judge by Smelling
the Freshness of Fresh and Seafood and their Satisfaction about Freshness of Fresh and Seafood
Customers’ Satisfaction about Freshness of Fresh and
Seafood
Frequency
Very
Very
Dissatisfied Satisfied
Dissatisfied
Satisfied
Whether Customers Judge by
Smelling the Freshness of Fresh
and Seafood
Total
Never
0.00%
4.0%
0.00%
3.0%
7.0%
Occasionally
4.0%
41.0%
9.0%
3.0%
57.0%
Frequently
0.00%
8.0%
12.0%
0.00%
20.0%
Always
0.00%
4.0%
8.0%
4.0%
16.0%
10.0%
100.0%
Total
4.0%
57.0%
29.0%
Note 1: Data Sources: Derived from the questionnaire and the analysis using SPSS Software
Table 2 shows that 75% of those who would inspect the freshness of food by means of smelling is
satisfied or very satisfied with the freshness of fresh and seafood. Then it can be concluded that
customers often experience first a brief sense of smelling to be impressed by the negative information
about the related product (s) and then their shopping process would try to avoid identification by their
taste of the related food. A supermarket, on the one hand, has to ensure their food quality and fresh smell
and, on the other, has to develop their consumers’ shopping habits to actively experience the sense of
smelling.
Table 3: Cross-tab for Supermarket Staff Courteous Service and whether Customers Shop Further in the
Related Supermarket
Whether Customers Shop Further in the Related
Supermarket
Total
Frequency
Do not
Relatively
Agree
agree
Disagreed
agree
totally
Do not agree
53.00%
5.00%
48.00%
0.00%
0.00%
totally
Customers think that
Relatively
supermarket-staff have courteous
16.00%
0.00%
4.00%
4.00%
8.00%
agree
service and kind attitude.
Agree
0.00%
15.00%
9.00%
7.00%
31.00%
Total
5.00%
67.00%
13.00%
15.00%
100.00%
Note 1: Data Sources: Derived from the questionnaire and the analysis using SPSS Software
Table 3 shows that 67% of the customers express that their further patronizing of the related
supermarket is a limited possibility, of which 48% are relatively dissatisfied with the service of staff.
This shows that the service quality of a supermarket is related to the customer's emotional experience
and positively correlated to customer behavior loyalty. It should also be noted that 48.4% of the people
satisfied with the supermarket staff service are more likely not to patronize further. All these have
illustrated that it would be not enough for a supermarket to improve alone their service to encourage
customers to enjoy a satisfactory emotional experience, which is relatively a primitive means.
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Table 4: Cross-tab for Reasonable Pricing in Supermarkets and General Sensing of Shopping
Whether Customers Shop Further in the Related
Supermarket
Frequency
Total
Do not
Relatively
Disagreed
Agree
agree totally
agree
Customers think that pricing in
supermarkets is reasonable.
Do not agree
totally
Relatively
agree
Agree
Total
4.00%
40.00%
0.00%
0.00%
44.00%
5.00%
16.00%
20.00%
0.00%
41.00%
0.00%
4.00%
0.00%
11.00%
15.00%
9.00%
60.00%
20.00%
11.00%
100.00%
Note 1: Data Sources: Derived from the questionnaire and the analysis using SPSS Software
Table 4 shows that 60% of the customers have their overall dissatisfying feeling of supermarket
shopping, of which 40% express that they are somewhat dissatisfied with the supermarket pricing.
Meanwhile, 15% of the customers think that the supermarket pricing is reasonable, of which 73.3% of
feel good about their shopping then. All these have illustrated that the supermarket pricing would impact
the customers in their thinking experience, which is positively related to the customer emotional loyalty.
The supermarket pricing is of great significance in respect to a customer's shopping experience.
Table 5: Cross-tab for whether Customers Shop Further
in case of Supermarket Shuttle Convenience while Prices Higher than Other Stores
Whether Customers Shop Further while Prices Higher
than Other Stores
Frequency
Do not agree
Relatively
Disagreed
Agree
totally
agree
Disagreed
Customers think that the
supermarket shuttle is
convenient.
Total
Do not agree
totally
Relatively
agree
Agree
Total
0.00%
8.00%
4.00%
0.00%
12.00%
1.00%
37.00%
20.00%
4.00%
62.00%
4.00%
4.00%
8.00%
0.00%
16.00%
3.00%
0.00%
0.00%
7.00%
10.00%
8.00%
49.00%
32.00%
11.00%
100.00%
Note 1: Data Sources: Derived from the questionnaire and the analysis using SPSS Software
Table 5 shows that 62% of patrons express their further shopping even when the prices in the related
supermarket are slightly higher than other stores, of which 38.8% agree or agreed relatively. This has
illustrated that the supermarket accessibility is not closely related to customer action experience and
whether launching a convenient shuttle service has presented limited impact on customer behavior
loyalty.
Table 6: Cross-tab for whether considering others’ opinions or making recommendation to others
Customer further shopping even when the prices in the
related supermarket are slightly higher than other stores
Total
Frequency
Do not agree
Relatively
Agree
Disagreed
totally
agree
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Customer consideration
of others’ opinions about
a supermarket
Do not
agree totally
Relatively
agree
Agree
Total
0.00%
36.00%
17.00%
8.00%
61.00%
0.00%
4.00%
20.00%
1.00%
25.00%
6.00%
0.00%
4.00%
4.00%
14.00%
6.00%
40.00%
41.00%
13.00%
100.00%
Note 1: Data Sources: Derived from the questionnaire and the analysis using SPSS Software
Table 6 shows that 40% of customers do not always recommend a supermarket to their friends or other
family members, of which 90% would not consider the opinions of others as a reference. This has
illustrated that a considerable number of customers would refuse to have interaction experience during
the shopping in a supermarket and 42.9% of customers that would consider others opinions would not
make any recommendation to others. Besides, 61.5% of those who are willing to recommend to others
do not refer to the views of others. This shows that there is obvious asymmetry when customers have
their interaction experience. Those good at providing advice are often reluctant to accept the views of
others, and vice versa. Supermarkets should identify to seek the “opinion leaders” while using the
customers’ word of mouth for the promotion so that information resources for publicity can be
concentrated onto these “opinion leaders” as much as possible.
Table 7: Cross-tab for whether Customers Shop further after a Particular Dissatisfied Case
and the Positive Views about the Related Supermarket Reputation
Customers having Positive Views about
Supermarket Reputation
Frequency
Total
Do not agree
Relatively
Disagreed
Agree
totally
agree
Customers Shop further after a
Particular Dissatisfied Case.
Disagreed
Do not agree
totally
Relatively
agree
Agree
0.00%
8.00%
4.00%
0.00%
12.00%
1.00%
37.00%
20.00%
4.00%
62.00%
4.00%
4.00%
8.00%
0.00%
16.00%
3.00%
0.00%
0.00%
7.00%
10.00%
11.00%
100.00%
Total
8.00%
49.00%
32.00%
Note 1: Data Sources: Derived from the questionnaire and the analysis using SPSS Software
Table 7 shows that 65% of patrons do not agree with supermarket reputation, of which 80.1% are not
willing to patronize again after they are dissatisfied with a particular purchase while 17% of the
customers who express their further shopping at the related supermarket even after their dissatisfied
purchase agree the high reputation of a supermarket. This shows that the reputation created by
businesses would played an inestimable role for the establishing of customer loyalty feelings and even
for the transformation process from emotional loyalty to behavior loyalty. Therefore, the reputation of a
supermarket plays a positive role in its implementation effect of experiential marketing.
4. Conclusion
The implementation of the supermarket experiential marketing and the statistical analysis on the
questionnaire regarding customer satisfaction have concluded that emotional experience, thinking
experience, action experience and interaction experience impact positively the customer emotional
loyalty while emotional experience, thinking experience and action experience impact positively the
customer behavioral loyalty. Besides, there is a positive relationship between the emotional loyalty and
behavioral loyalty. All of these have also illustrated that the level of the satisfaction customers gain from
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these experiences would directly influence the customer loyalty on a supermarket and on the
development of a supermarket. The sensory experience presents a negative correlation to customer
loyalty and the related analysis has presented the reasons as below. On the one hand, it is obvious that
prices and quality of commodities are the core interests most concerned by customers of a supermarket
and, on the other, the environment of a supermarket would include indoor temperature, light, crowding,
air, flow of goods and background music, etc. which are basic circumstances. Along with the firce
competition of supermarkets as well as the diversification of promotions, onsite tasting or live cooking
are getting more and more common. The lack of these basic factors, customers may be dissatisfied.
However, because these needs are “expected” by customers, providing of such needs available will
provide no improving of customer loyalty.
References
[1]. Liu Dun, He Peng and Shi Lili, Rough Set Featured Model for Measuring Customer Loyalty, Soft
Science, 2009 (6), pages 135-139
[2]. Bernd H Schmitt, Experiential Marketing, Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2004
[3]. S A Blackwell S L Szeinbaeh J H Barnses W Garner and V Bush “The Antecedents
of Customer Loyalty” Journal of Service Research Vo1 1 No 4 May 1999 362—375
[4]. Wang Xiaozhen and Zhou Meihua, Review on Customer Experiences and Customer Loyalty,
Academic Forum, 2008 (44), pages 22-24
[5]. Bernad Schmitt. Experiebtial Marketing Journal of Marketing Management, 1999, 15(3) 53-67
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