Consumer's Attitude and Retailers' Images in Creating Store Choice. A Study of Two Different Sides of the Same Story

The determinants of store choice on the part of the consumer are complex. Our study indicates that consumers find the issues relevant to store choice as lacking in quality and certainly not congruent nor tangential to the retail marketing concept. As our model shows, perceptions are developed through stimuli that are created by the retail environment both internal and external. If these were the only issues retailers had to deal with, their challenge in understanding consumer store choice behavior would be formidable. Add to those dimensions the perceptions that are formed through the consumer's own psychological, physiological and behavioral attributes and the complexities of the challenge can seem to be insurmountable. The complexity of the situation increases exponentially when, as our research seems to indicate, the psychological and behavioral components can be compounded by such little understood dimensions as ambivalence and vicarious sociality. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Retailers need to benefit themselves by reaching out the broad resources of research to effectively develop the resource information necessary to successfully position themselves relative to their consumers expectations. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.