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Introduction
The context for this paper is the branding of shopping malls. Planned and managed shopping malls emerged as a format phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. Arguably, the mall was a reinterpretation of the department store, which had offered a multiplicity of services and products, and which had been the site for the reimagining of shopping with the introduction of spectacle and emphasis on the shopping experience. The setting for this paper is consumer perceptions of shopping centres, also termed malls. The term, shopping mall, refers to planned shopping centres with a centralised management team. Despite their economic significance, there are relatively few image or branding studies of malls. Notwithstanding, industry continues to deliver ever more extraordinary malls such as the Chengde Tianshan Retail Center (Inside Retail Asia, 2015).
The purpose of this paper is to discover and better understand critical mall brand associations and the components of brand meaning, which consumers give to shopping malls. The positioning of the paper in emphasising brand meaning differentiates the current paper from the literature, which focuses on the brand image profile.
The contribution of the paper is in two major areas. Firstly and most critically, the paper pioneeringly identifies two major consumer mall brand associations, namely, mall atmosphere and mall merchandise . In turn, these two brand associations are the basis for consumer-based mall brand meaning. Additionally, the study contributes to the experiential branding literature. Experiential branding exemplifies shopping mall branding. In particular, the current study allows not just for sensory experiences but also for the role of the core service.
The structure of the paper proceeds with a literature review, focusing on mall-related research, but also the supporting literatures of experiential marketing and brand experiences. Brand meaning is explained in detail and illustrated with recent studies. A conceptual model of mall brand meaning follows. The research design explains the details of the quantitative research method. The structural equation modelling (SEM) results are given and then interpreted in relation to the literature review in the discussion section. The paper ends with practical implications, limitations and future research and conclusion.
The literature
The literature, which forms the platform for this study, spans several domains: malls and consumers; experiential branding; branding and malls; mall image studies; the relationship between...