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1. Introduction
In today's highly competitive market place, it is increasingly hard for restaurants to develop creative marketing strategies to retain existing customers and attract new ones. Yet from a customer's viewpoint, an increase in competition means that customers now have a lot more options to choose from. Accordingly, customers are becoming more sophisticated in discriminating between products and selecting better options from a broader range of alternatives based on the value they can obtain from their choices. Likewise, restaurant diners currently have far more alternatives for each restaurant segment (e.g. fast food restaurants, casual-dining restaurants, and fine dining restaurants). Therefore, distinctive segment-specific marketing strategies should be explored by restaurant operators in order to differentiate their restaurant's unique characteristics and appeal to target customers from other restaurant segments.
Restaurants provide foods, services, and dining environments. These are considered basic attributes that customers use to evaluate perceived quality ([24] Jang and Namkung, 2009). Although they represent the general components of all restaurants, each restaurant segment tries to reflect distinctive properties or characteristics based on these basic attributes. Since restaurant attributes are directly related to customers' dining experiences, restaurant operators and marketing researchers have been interested in the effects of various attributes on customer satisfaction and post-consumption behaviors in each restaurant segment (e.g. [5] Bonjanic, 2007; [33] Kwun and Oh, 2006; [36] Liu and Jang, 2009; [37] McCleary et al. , 2008; [7] Chen and Hu, 2010; [54] Ryu et al. , 2012). Even though restaurants provide several attributes based on customers' needs and wants, they may not comprehend the actual purpose or ultimate goal customers seek from a dining experience without examining the benefits and hidden values they desire from those specific attributes.
Marketing researchers have suggested that the best performing firms continuously develop new strategies to improve consumer value ([44] Parasuraman, 1997; [63] Woodruff, 1997). Consumer value is the end goal a consumer desires from a consumption situation and plays a critical role in all marketing activities ([23] Holbrook, 1999). [63] Woodruff (1997) suggested that attributes are the basic source of products or services, whereas consumer value is an upper-level concept used to understand consumer behaviors in consumption situations. Therefore, examining consumer value provides more specific information regarding the purpose for visiting a restaurant, or...