Human crowding and store messiness: Drivers of retail shopper confusion and behavioral intentions

Abstract

With today's cut‐throat competition, brick and mortar retailers are engaging in various in‐store elements like ambience, visual design, and social factors to entice consumers. However, these environmental stimuli if not used properly can lead to retail shopper confusion that can negatively influence shopper behavioral intentions. Drawing on the theoretical argument that information overload facilitates retail shopper confusion, two experimental studies are conducted. The findings of both studies suggest a main effect of human crowding and store messiness for each dimension of retail shopper confusion—irritation, inefficiency, and helplessness. Mediating role of retail shopper confusion between human crowding, store messiness, and shopping behavioral intentions is also examined. Interactive impact of human crowding and store messiness suggests store messiness to be more problematic. The moderating role of shopping motivations (task vs. recreational) is also examined that suggests the negative effect of retail shopper confusion for consumers pursuing recreational shopping motivations. These findings across the two studies offer a new perspective that recommend the importance of organized retail store environments. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The Influence of Social Crowding on Consumers’ Preference for Green Products

“…A pre-test was conducted to examine the manipulation of the social crowding in study 4 increased feelings of crowding. The manipulation was adapted from the study of Coskun et al (2019) . 85 participants were recruited online ( M age = 24.53, SD = 4.49, age range 18–35, female 50.59%).…”

Store disorderliness effect: shoppers' competitive behaviours in a fast-fashion retail store

“…To measure in-store hiding behaviour, a three-item scale developed by Gupta and Gentry (2016b) was adopted. To check the manipulation of human crowding and store messiness, items were adopted from the study done by Coskun et al (2019). Also, perceived realism of the scenario and adaptation of the shopper to the scenario were measured to understand the believability of the study.…”

“…High influx of consumers can lead to disorganized shelves, unsorted merchandise and messy racks within the store, while they try to find some products of interest. Further, recent study done by Coskun et al (2019) suggested that both human crowding and store messiness lead to retail shopper confusion that affects consumers' behavioural intentions such as spending time in the store, store patronage and revisit intentions.…”

Consumer confusion: a systematic review and research directions

“…In terms of the application of consumer confusion in different contexts, scholars have worked across a diverse range of products and services. Confusion has been explored in physical retailing (Coskun et al, 2019;Shiu and Tzeng, 2018;Shiu, 2017;Garaus and Wagner, 2016;Garaus et al, 2015;Wobker et al, 2015), internet retailing (Garaus, 2018), mobile phones and electronic products (Turnbull et al, 2000;Ghosh and Rao, 2014;Leek and Kun, 2006), organic and nutritional food products (Chryssochoidis, 2000;Spiteri Cornish and Moraes, 2015;Leek et al, 2015), prescription drugs (Amoozegar et al, 2017), green products and eco-labels (Moon et al, 2017;Chen and Chang, 2013), watches (Mitchell and Papavassiliou, 1997), apparels (Stanton and Paolo, 2012) and the wine industry (Drummond and Rule, 2005). In the services area, the importance of confusion has been highlighted in the health-care sector (Chauhan and Sagar, 2020;Gebele et al, 2014), financial services (Shukla et al, 2010), higher education sector (Drummond, 2004) and online tourism services (Lu et al, 2016;Lu and Gursoy, 2015).…”