Retail Patronage – A Well-Known but Undefined Construct

Description

Nowadays, companies strive for the attention and ‘love’ of their customers (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016; Mintel, 2022). The reason for this is that these efforts result for example in higher revenues, increased sales volumes and more durable customer relationships (Hogreve et al., 2017; Zeithaml, 2000). The probability of selling to an existing customer is nearly about 70%, whereas the probability for new clients is approximately only between 5% and 10% (Griffin and Herres, 2002). In addition, regular customers account for around 70% of revenues, although they only make up just under 30% of the buyer base (Horizont, 2019). In the literature there are different definitions of brand loyalty (Ailawadi et al., 2014; Hozier and Stem, 1985) or brand love (Batra et al., 2012; Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen, 2010), but sometimes these constructs are not enough to describe a relationship between a company and their clients. Therefore, patronage behaviour describe an increased customer relationship intensity (Spiggle and Sewall, 1987; Pan and Zinkhan, 2006; Blut et al., 2018). Retail patronage is described and measured in various ways. For the measurement of retail patronage different variables like patronage intention (Wakefield and Baker, 1998), attitude (Spears and Singh, 2004) and word-of-mouth (Baker et al., 2002) are used. Blut et al. (2018) mentioned in their future research agenda that the existing measures about retail patronage are insufficient and therefore should be extended. Hence, the need for a scale development of the construct retail patronage is suggested. In view of that, this study aims to conceptualise the construct retail patronage in a more detailed way. The goal is to explore the construct of retail patronage. Thus, this provides the basis for the development of a comprehensive scale for retail patronage. Furthermore, the project analyses the effects of retail patronage on shopping outcomes, such as satisfaction with the retailer and shopping frequency.

Period	09 Sept 2022
Event title	7th Colloquium on European Research in Retailing 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	CroatiaShow on map