The Effects of Situational Factors on In-Store Grocery Shopping Behavior: The Role of Store Environment and Time Available for Shopping

Vision (im)possible? The effects of in-store signage on customers’ visual attention

“…However, this is directly contradictory to two earlier studies, which have showed that customers without previous shopping experience in a store make more unplanned purchases; at least when the time available for shopping is not limited (Iyer, 1989;Park et al, 1989). …”

“…Store-familiar customers (that is, customers who are used to visiting a particular store during grocery shopping) are better at correctly identifying their location in the shopping environment (Dogu & Erkip, 2000;Titus & Everett, 1996), which means that their in-store navigation should be less cognitively demanding than that of store-unfamiliar customers (Inman et al, 2009;Park et al, 1989). This reasoning is supported by theories on processing fluency ("the subjective experience of ease with which people process information;" Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009, p. 219), which show that familiar stimuli are processed more fluently than new stimuli (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Schwarz, 2004;Weaver et al, 2007;Winkielman et al, 2003).…”

“…A large body of research in fields as diverse as environmental psychology, architecture, marketing, and consumer behavior has consistently concluded that familiarity improves a person's performance on navigational tasks (Bryant, 1982;Chebat et al, 2005;Dogu & Erkip, 2000;Gärling et al, 1983;Hölscher et al, 2006;O'Neill, 1992;Prestopnik & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2000;Titus & Everett, 1995;. Iyer (1989) and Park et al (1989) argued that customers without repetitive shopping experiences in a store will attend to a larger number of in-store cues in their navigation than customers who are familiar with the store's layout. This line of thought is justified by neuroscientific findings that unfamiliar stimuli elicit more attentional orienting than familiar stimuli (Desimonde et al, 1995).…”

“…However, it should be noted that Iyer (1989) and Park et al (1989) manipulated store familiarity by assigning participants either to a grocery store in which they shopped most frequently or to stores in which they had never shopped before. On the contrary, both the present study and the Inman et al (2009) study measured store familiarity.…”

“…Furthermore, in both the present study and in the Inman et al (2009) study, customers were not asked to express their activities and decisions during the shopping trip. Conversely, Iyer (1989) and Park et al (1989) explicitly instructed participants to verbalize their thoughts and describe their actions while shopping (with an interviewer following them at close distance). Although it is difficult to compare verbal protocols with nonverbal data (such as eye-tracking measures), "the evidence consistently suggests that verbal protocols do not provide as detailed a process trace as eye fixations" (Russo, 1978, p. 566).…”