A Research On The Effect Of Multiple Store Image Similarity On Customers' Spread Patronage

Spread Patronage is that customers are attracted by a gathering scope within one or some stores to patronize incidentally other retailing stores nearby.Consumers' spread patronage is the concrete manifestation form of demand externalities,and at the same time it is also one of the main sources of agglomeration economy in the context of commercial agglomeration.Therefore,the problem of how to maximize the spread patronage has become the focus of practitioners and researchers.Some scholars make the concept of multiple store image similarity into the study of spread patronage,whose results show that when the similarity of multiple store image is greater in the shopping center,the possibility of spread patronage will be greater,on the contrary,when the similarity of multiple store image is smaller in the shopping center,the possibility of spread patronage will be smaller.However,the multiple store image similarity can not fully explain the influence of spread patronage.So this study will explore the effect of multiple store image similarity on spread patronage.More specifically,this study constructs the relationship model of multiple store image similarity,trust transfer and spread patronage,and puts forward the hypothesis that image similarity affects spread patronage through the trust transfer.This study uses the intercept way to make consumers participate in questionnaires in the most typical Hongqi Street Wanda Shopping Center in Changchun City,which issued 300 questionnaires,including 263 valid questionnaires.We can get the following conclusions from the collected data through the SPSS and AMOS analysis software:First,as the multiple store image similarity becomes greater in the shopping center,the possibility that customers will be attracted by the perferred shop to patronage secondary stores will become greater;on the contrary,as the multiple store image similarity becomes smaller in the shopping center,the possibility that customers will be attracted by the perferred shop to patronage secondary stores will become smaller.Second,as the multiple store image similarity becomes greater in the shopping center,the trust on the perferred shop is more easily transferred to the secondary stores.Third,trust transfer plays the mediating effect between multiple store image and spread patronage under the influence of multiple store image similarity on the influence of spread patronage.The main contributions of this study lie in:First,it makes the concept of trust transfer into the study of spillover patronage to further supplement the theoretical foundation of the spread patronage.Second,it verifies that the trust transfer has a positive impact on the multiple store spread patronage in the context of shopping center's multiple store image similarity.Third,it is beneficial for the shopping center managers to consider the price,service,atmosphere and hardware facilities and so on to make multiple store image similar from the perspective of consumer trust transfer,which can promote consumers to patronage multiple store in the process of shopping.