Understanding consumers use of restaurants in Shopping Centers

: an application of the EKB Model

Abstract

Food and eating habits are getting very complex. The study of eating has become a multidisciplinary task resorting to scientists from various fields of science like nutrition, public health, food engineering, marketing, management and, more recently, psychology. Understanding consumer’s lifestyles is of paramount importance in the actual customer-centric market where anticipating consumer needs and desires represents a decisive competitive advantage. Restaurants are the epitome of this complexity producing numerous day-to-day interactions with consumers on a myriad of issues such as type of food, nutritional concerns, satisfaction of basic physiological needs and even socialization with staff and other costumers. Nowadays restaurants are facing rough times with VAT increase and diminishing use due to the economic downturn. It has never been so important to understand consumer’s needs in order to make businesses thrive. The main objective of this study is to better understand how consumers choose one restaurant hoping to use the acquired knowledge to improve business strategy and tactics. For that, the renowned Engel-Kollat-Backwell model was used as a theoretical framework assuming that consumption occurs to resolve a certain need. Due to methodological simplification purposes, work focuses on restaurants located inside shopping centres, particularly on weekdays. Literature review of the theoretical model and its application to restaurants combined with the study of the different aspects of a meal was used to develop a survey about the consumer decision process when using a restaurant. In order to validate empirical knowledge where substantial differences between lunch and dinner time occur, participants were asked to share their opinions about both meal times. Time and money spent were chosen to be studied as dependent variables. Factorial analysis was used to identify common factors amongst the independent variables. The independent variables with the highest absolute loading factor were used to perform four linear regressions in order to find which variables influenced time and money spent in a restaurant located inside a shopping centre on weekdays. Demographic variables where also included in the regression models. Money and time spent is influenced by different variables when it comes to meal time. Lunch time seems to have a simple process with less relevant variables and dimensions. Attitudes and values on food-related issues were found to be very significant in explaining the behaviour of the dependent variables despite some conflicts between attitudes and actual behaviour. Cooking habits as in the absence of time and will to cook also turned out to be good predictors despite the overall high cooking skills of the respondents. Companies should use some of the information delivered to improve some areas of their businesses. This paper provides a general exploration of the consumer decision process when choosing a restaurant inside a shopping centre opening the door to further work on a matter that has not received proper attention from investigators, at least in Portugal.

Date of Award	28 Aug 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Miguel Sottomayor (Supervisor) & Timothy Hogg (Co-Supervisor)