A New Scale Measures the Shopping Mall Experience

Summary

As malls struggle to keep customers coming, a satisfying shopping experience as an effective marketing medium has become a top priority. How to measure that experience was the focus of this study by Haiyan Hu (Morgan State University) and Cynthia R. Jasper (University of Wisconsin – Madison) in the Journal of Advertising Research In addition to qualitative research, Hu and Jasper created a 22-item scale that measures the nature of the shopping experience—an empirical measure of the perceptions of the customer about various aspects of their experiences. The authors focused on behavioral measures, such as visit frequency, average expenditure per visit, and average spending on food per visit, as outcomes of shopping experience. Their scale took into account several aspects of the overall shopping experience, which the authors developed based on initial surveys. With that architecture in place, the authors found that

• For many, the shopping mall is the primary venue for meeting places, dining, community centers, and entertainment, not just a place to purchase goods and
  • “The dichotomous view of hedonic and utilitarian shopping ought to be replaced with a multifaceted shopping-experience model.”
• Consumers still view shopping malls as their primary destination for fashion
• Reinventing the food court and snack shops will encourage shoppers to linger
• Shopping mall patrons can be targeted with experiential marketing, promoting “shopper socialization, encourage further exploration of unique and novel items, and present a community-based space that cannot be found through other channels, such as the Internet.”
• Mall managers need to work with individual stores to set the service bar high.
• Good service will “encourage more exploration by customers, thus increasing the opportunities for media exposure and point-of-sale persuasion.”