Retail Atmospherics and In‐Store Nonverbal Cues: An Introduction

Abstract

Customers' in‐store experiences are having a profound impact on their shopping behavior. In this special issue, two key variables are highlighted: the retail environment and role of nonverbal cues. The eight papers in this special issue present numerous cutting edge issues in these two research domains. Each of these papers and some of their salient contributions are briefly overviewed in this introductory editorial. The goal of this special issue (and the articles in it) is to serve as an impetus for additional research.

Service environment research opportunities

“…Academics have also emphasized the importance of physical retail stores. Grewal et al (2014) suggest that the in-store experience is critical because it forms the foundation of a long-term relationship with customers. Moreover, a store’s environment can be a unique source of competitive advantage for a retailer (Brüggen et al , 2011).…”

Shopping cues: Conceptualization, scale development, and validation

“…Answering calls for future research initiatives on retail atmospherics and nonverbal cues (Grewal et al, 2014), we aim to provide a conceptualization that encompasses the essence of shopping cues while offering consistency with the literature on related constructs. To this end, this study conceptualizes a shopping cue as a second-order construct consisting of two factors—tangible and intangible—with multiple dimensions.…”

“…The growth in popularity of shopping cues across retailers and service outlets has opened a new research age for academics (Madzharov et al, 2015). In the past few years, researchers have investigated how shoppers behave when they encounter shopping cues, approaching the topic from multi-faceted angles, such as understanding unplanned consideration and purchase conversion using in-store video tracking (Hui, Huang, Suher, & Jeffrey Inman, 2013); in-store social influence on shopper behavior (Zhang, Li, Burke, & Leykin, 2014); impact of the retail environment and role of nonverbal cues (Grewal, Roggeveen, Puccinelli, & Spence, 2014); impact of PoP olfactory cues on shopper behavior (Kaisa, 2017); multi-sensory congruent cue effects on shopper behavior (Helmefalk & Hultén, 2017); emotions, store-environmental cues, store-choice criteria, and marketing outcomes (Walsh, Shiu, Hassan, Michaelidou, & Beatty, 2011); and store atmospheric effects on shopper behavior from a multi-sensory perspective (Spence, Puccinelli, Grewal, & Roggeveen, 2014).…”

Untitled

“…Consequently, there have been concerted efforts within the academia to study the extent of infl uence of retail atmosphere on consumer purchase behaviour. While some of these studies were approached from a holistic (all the environmental cues) standpoint (Kotler, 1973;Turley and Milliman 2000;Puccinelli et al, 2009;Kumar et al, 2010;Chen and Hsieh, 2011;Joshi and Kulkarni, 2012;Bohl, 2012;Grewal et al, 2014;Singh et al, 2014), others focus on specifi c atmospheric cues such as background music (Santos and Freire, 2013;Milliman, 1982), store space (Markin et al, 1976), crowding (Eroglu and Harrell, 1986;Hui and Bateson, 1991), music and lighting and social interaction (Baker et al, 1992).…”