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Mona A. Clark: School of Management and Consumer Studies, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
Roy C. Wood: The Scottish Hotel School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the IAHMS Autumn Symposium, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, November 1996.
Introduction
This article constitutes a preliminary expression of the authors' interest in the area of consumer loyalty in the restaurant sector and, in particular, the factors that engender such loyalty. The main objective of the arguments here is to question certain assumptions that have become current in academic discussions of consumer behaviour in the context of hospitality services, especially restaurant choice, in the belief that in so doing, it will be possible to clarify issues of relevance for practitioners. Having said this, what follows is unashamedly an exploratory analysis intended to stimulate further reflection on an important issue in restaurant marketing.
Consumer research into restaurant choice
Remarkably little has been written on consumer choice in a hospitality industry context (but see Wood, 1995) and there is even less on consumer loyalty. The shortest route to assessing loyalty as a meaningful consumer response in restaurant choice is to focus on those inferences to be drawn from assessments of the factors consumers rate as important in such choice. The small literature on this subject has, as its defining characteristic, a focus on research methods that seek to elicit the role of key variables in the choice of restaurant given a number of alternative scenarios. For example, June and Smith (1987) use conjoint analysis on a sample of 50 affluent upper middle-class professionals in their survey. Conjoint analysis involves a complex ranking of attributes set against the chosen hypothetical contexts (for notes on the method see Ryan (1994) who offers a useful introduction). For four such contexts, June and Smith derived the results shown in Table I.
Given that this survey drew on data from affluent diners the results are fascinating in so far as food quality is, in all but one case, relegated to fourth position, and atmosphere to fifth position. This raises questions about the significance of "intangible" factors other than service in restaurant selection, a point central to the work of Lewis (1981) and Auty (1992).
Lewis (1981) considered five...