Time flies: the role of desire to stay at the mall in enhancing the shopping experience: an abstract

The desire to stay at the shopping area is one of the main approach behaviors in retailing (Bitner 1992). Previous research has shown that satisfaction predicts shoppers’ desire to stay in shopping (Lloyd et al. 2014; Siu et al. 2012) and that the desire to stay is linked to other antecedents like service quality (De Nisco and Warnaby 2013), convenience (Lloyd et al. 2014), social (Martin and Turley 2004), emotional (Sherman et al. 1997), aesthetic, and environmental factors (Vukadin et al. 2018). These findings suggest two possible explanations: (1) higher levels of satisfaction lead to the desire to stay more in shopping, a link which has been investigated (Lloyd et al. 2014; Siu et al. 2012); (2) the desire to stay can be due to reasons other than satisfaction, including the surrounding environment. Based on that, we look at the impact of visual and sound atmospherics cues on the desire to stay in the mall, satisfaction, and patronage intentions. Then, we investigate whether the desire to stay contributes to enhancing the other retail outcomes of patronage intentions and positive Word of Mouth (WoM). Furthermore, we study the mediating role of shopper satisfaction in the relation between the desire to stay at the mall, positive WoM, and patronage intentions. To test the proposed research model, we use Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze data collected from a convenience sample of mall shoppers. Results show that both color and music influence the desire to stay, while lighting does not. Moreover, there is a significant path between visual cues and satisfaction, while there is no significant path from any of the studied atmospherics to patronage intentions. Regarding the relation between desire to stay and shopping outcomes; results show that the desire to stay influences positive WoM directly, however, there is no such influence on patronage intentions. Finally, desire to stay impacts on both WoM and patronage intentions when considering the mediating role of satisfaction. This paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it adds color and music to the antecedents of desire to stay at the mall. Second, to the authors’ best knowledge, there is no prior research addressing the impact of desire to stay on positive WoM. Finally, previous research analyses the scenario of shoppers feeling satisfied then decided to stay more time in the mall. This research studies the opposite relationship, as a shopping trip can last longer due to different reasons other than satisfaction, and looks at how satisfaction mediates the role of desire to stay in driving shoppers to spend more money and refer positively to the shopping mall.