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1. Introduction
According to the US Census Bureau [1], the world population exceeded seven billion in 2012. How to best serve this rapidly increasing and diversifying world population is an important point for retailers and marketers to consider. Many researchers have sought to ascertain the characteristics and shopping habits of the population at large (Kinley et al., 2000). However, it is not clear whether or how various customer segments differently evaluate furniture store atmospheric attributes.
Much of the literature on the attractiveness, pleasantness and spaciousness of retail stores, such as department stores, grocery stores and restaurants, has focused on the critical influence of store image attributes. As a number of authors (Mitchell, 1998; Lee et al., 2003, Skandrani et al., 2011; Grewal and Levy, 2007; Carida et al., 2010; Puccinelli et al., 2009; Verhoef et al., 2009; Grewal et al., 2009) have pointed out, store image attributes exert an important influence on store choice and store loyalty. Martineau (1958) was the first to characterize store image as the “retail store personality”; Aron (1961) reasserted this suggestion, and most researchers subsequently accepted that store image is a complex combination of psychological attributes and a store’s tangible and intangible or functional qualities (Zimmer and Golden, 1988; Porter and Claycomb, 1997).
Many researchers (Hoffman and Turley, 2002) have dealt with the “perception of store atmospherics” – the interaction of the tangible and intangible elements created by customers’ feelings and thoughts within the scope of their previous knowledge, experience and expectations. Those researchers have determined that customer perceptions of store atmospherics strongly influence shopping and patronage behaviour. Few studies in that regard, however, have examined how perceptions of store atmospheric attributes might vary across customer segments (Joyce and Lambert, 1996; Dube and Morgan, 1996; Yildirim, 2005).
Some studies addressing this issue have focused generally on determining the effect of age on customer evaluations of store atmospherics. However, few and insufficient have been the examinations of differences among such other demographic variables as gender, education, income, family size, family life cycle, religion, race, nationality and occupation, as suggested by Mitchell (1998) and Aylott and Mitchell (1999). Consequently, this study focuses on customer evaluations of store atmospheric attributes in the furniture store setting. Previous...