The impact of environmental cues on customers' quality perception and willingness to pay, and the moderating role of consumer mood and motives

• Autor(a) principal: Marcomini, Silvia
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/17765
• topic: Consumer behavior; Marketing; Environmental cues; Consumer moods; Shopping motivation; Quality perception; Willingness to pay; Store environment; Administração de empresas; Comportamento do consumidor; Marketing

The literature shows that shopping environment has an impact on various consumer behaviors, and that favourable environmental cues are associated with higher customer’ quality perception and willingness to pay. I investigated and found that this is true only when consumers are in a positive mood. When they are in a negative mood, consumers infer higher quality from a discount-looking shop. A between-design experimental survey has been conducted to analyze the impact of shopping environment, mood and shopping motivation on customers’ perception of quality and willingness to pay. Two mood conditions (positive/negative) have been created and induced to respondents at the beginning of the survey, along with two shopping environment conditions (upscale-looking/discount-looking) based on design, scent and sales personnel factors. Results show that shopping environment does not impact significantly the dependent variables but it interacts significantly with mood to determine quality perception; shopping motivation impacts significantly both quality perception and willingness to pay.