The Research On The Supermarkets' Image Evaluation From The Stakeholders' Perspective

In the middle of 20^th century, Boulding first proposed the concept of image that human behavior is not totally guided by knowledge and information, and that the image perceived by the individual on a specific thing casts great influence on the behavior decision, i.e. behavior is the result of image. Martineau introduced "image" into the commercial retail field and interpreted "shop character or image" as the way customers define some shop. After that, the study on shop image came into flourishing.In the applied study on shop image, researchers are inclined to conduct their research from the perspective of a shop image's some property or factor whose influence on the customer's behavior, e.g. color, crowd, background music, goods display, sales, service recover, the distance from a shop to customers' home or work, is also involved in the research. In the field of shop image evaluation, present study is centered on the perspective of consumers to probe into the establishment of evaluation index system that reflects all the stakeholders' requests. Since there are so many kinds of shop, this paper selects supermarkets' image as the study object to better interpret my point of view.This paper first reviews the relevant theories at home and abroad concerning supermarkets, shop image, and stakeholder. Based on this, I propose an evaluation model on supermarkets' image from the perspective of stakeholder. This model argues that the evaluation model on supermarkets' image should consist of three latitudes, ten factors, and nine-teen indexes. The three latitudes are social image, market image, and professional image.Finally, the empirical study showed that different evaluation subjects will start from different aspects to evaluate supermarkets' image with different criteria, thus leading to the different proportion of each factor. Considering the specific personality of every evaluation subject and their shared features, we discover that social image, market image, and professional image are the three latitudes taken by all the evaluation subjects. The only difference lies in their different proportions in the mind of evaluation subjects.Market image consists of a variety of evaluation standards from the aspect of the common consumers and their feelings when shopping in the supermarket, including goods, purchase atmosphere, advertisement and sales.Social image is a criterion from the perspective of all the stakeholders' social property to evaluate the supermarket's contribution to the society, mainly measuring its service, convenience, social responsibility and brand.Professional image is a professional evaluation and criterion from the aspect of the supermarket trade to investigate a supermarket's daily business and development potential, mainly measuring its system and finance.This paper first takes the perspective of stakeholder to analyze supermarkets' image evaluation system and provides a new window for the research on shop image, thus broadening the horizon on shop image study from the single consumer perspective to all the stakeholders' possible requirements and helping the managers of supermarkets to take the interests of all those concerned into consideration.