Choosing a Restaurant: important attributes and related features of a consumer’s decision making process

Abstract

A correta identificação dos atributos considerados pelos consumidores em seu processo decisório de compra é um fator de competitividade para as organizações, bem como constitui um campo de conhecimento teórico sobre produtos e serviços existentes no mercado. Este trabalho buscou identificar quais são os atributos, e suas respectivas dimensões, considerados pelos consumidores em seu processo decisório para aescolha de restaurantes. Para tal, foram realizados dois estudos, sendo o primeiro um estudo qualitativo baseado em entrevistas com 23 consumidores de restaurantes. As contribuições dessa pesquisa foram utilizadas na elaboração do questionário usado no segundo estudo na cidade de Belo Horizonte em março de 2014. O questionário consistiuem um levantamento com amostra de 600 consumidores em restaurantes fast food, rodízio, self service e a la carte, resultando em 438 questionários válidos que foram analisados estatisticamente, obtendo-se 12 grupos formados a partir de 46 atributos (atendimento, beleza, conforto, localização próxima, localização conveniente, possibilidade de escolha, crianças, comodidade, promoções, valor percebido, entretenimento e fila). Na avaliação da comida, foram identificados dois grupos (organoléptica e apresentação) e no caso das bebidas foi gerado somente um grupo formado por sete indicadores. Os atributosrelacionados à higiene, qualidade da comida, atendimento e preço compõem a lista dos aspectos mais importantes no processo decisório do consumidor dos restaurantes (self service, rodízio, fast food e à la carte). A identificação desses atributos revelou similaridades entre os restaurantes pesquisados, além de possibilitar a comparação dosresultados obtidos com outras pesquisas realizadas na área.

Impacts of the perceived quality by consumers’ of à la carte restaurants on their attitudes and behavioural intentions

“…The model consists of the following steps: recognition of the need, search for information, evaluation of alternatives, purchase, consumption, post-purchase assessment and discard. Several authors have used this model in their papers on consumer behaviour in diverse economic sectors and activities, such as the automotive sector (Bevilacqua, 2013), coffee production (Silva et al, 2014), supermarkets (Moreira et al, 2013), mobile communications (Sata, 2013), group buying (Dias et al, 2014) and, finally, restaurants (Lima Filho et al, 2014;Azevedo et al, 2017;Loriato and Pelissari, 2017;Pedraja Iglesias and Jesus Yagüe Guillén, 2004).…”

Assessing the Importance of Health in Choosing a Restaurant: An Empirical Study from Romania

“…The analysis of the mean values for the attributes considered important in the decision-making process of restaurant selection indicated that the most important attribute for respondents is the “cleanliness of spaces”, which is a finding supported by other research [5,6,36,38,40,59,60,61,62], and is followed by food made from “fresh ingredients (not frozen)” [5,31]. Therefore, unlike other studies, which place “food quality” on the first rank when it comes to a restaurant selection (an intrinsic attribute) [10,11,12,13,14,29,30,31,32,33,34], Romanian consumers in Cluj-Napoca pay much more attention to “cleanliness of spaces” (an extrinsic attribute). Other important attributes were found to be the “ambiance” and the “variety of the menu”.…”

“…Among the internal features, food quality is considered a crucial factor of influence in the selection process of a restaurant [10,11,12,13,29,30,31,32] and a predictor of customer satisfaction [14,33,34]. It consists of two dimensions: organoleptic and presentation [12]. However, a study conducted on full service restaurants highlights that customers have greater expectations that exceed food quality by focusing on the quality of the service [15].…”

“…It is also argued that restaurant managers should consider these factors starting with the phase of restaurant concept creation, as the wrong one is often found to be the main cause of failure [26]. Even though the selection attributes that are considered to be important for consumers when dining out represented an area of research in other countries [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43], no similar studies were identified in Romania.…”

“…Most researchers focused on identifying the factors that influence consumer choice regarding restaurant selection in order to understand the starting point in building marketing strategies [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21] but few of them clustered the consumers based on the influencing factors [9,22,23]. In Romania, there is a lack of such studies describing consumer segments based on factors that affect their choice of dining in restaurants.…”