The relationship between lifestyle and store attribute with consumer satisfaction and loyalty in hypermarket industry in Iran

Abstract

Hypermarket industry is gaining popularity in these recent days. With variety of merchandise, services and facilities offering under-one-roof, consumers prefer to patronize in this store. Hence, understanding the consumer behavior in hypermarket is a great platform for retailers to be competitive. Lifestyle changes in Iran call for a need to further analyse consumer preferences to be aligned with the store attributes provided, which then lead to consumer satisfaction and ultimately store loyalty. However, lack of evaluation in the above matter from the perspective of Iranian resulted in unidentified focus as generalization from others may not be parallel. Additionally, many of previous study have partially examine the four important variable of lifestyle, store attributes, consumer satisfaction and store loyalty, showing its importance, conversely none have consider all four as a continuous model, which is the contribution of this study. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between three factor of lifestyle namely education oriented, socially active, credit prone with five important store attributes for the Iranian; store promotion, price, product assortment, store atmosphere and sales personnel. In addition, this study also examines to the relationship of the store attributes towards consumer satisfaction and further to store loyalty which is the aim of every retailer. The data was collected from a convenient sampling consisting sample of 385 respondents which are the consumers of 23 branches of Shahrvand Hypermarket in Iran. Returned questionnaire were analysed. The relationship between lifestyle, store attribute, consumer satisfaction and store loyalty was confirmed. It was found also that indirect link between store attribute and store royalty through consumer satisfaction (i.e. a indirect link) is stronger than direct link between store attribute and store loyalty.