Effects of perceived experiential value and flow experience on store satisfaction and purchasing intent: Comparison of online, physical and mobile store channels

During the 21st century, traditional marketing discipline that focuses on consumers, interested in functional characteristics and benefits, defines them as rational decision-making individuals, and focuses on narrow competition has left its place to modern marketing discipline, which today defines consumers as emotional decision-making individuals rather than consumers who make rational decisions. Consumers only want more than the distribution and consumption of products, are not only concerned with the functional value of the goods or services businesses provide to them, along with this value, are also interested in the pleasant feelings entrepreneurs arouse in them and the added values such as fun, extraordinary and unforgettable memories they will create in their memory. For this reason, it is now understood that consumption also has "hedonic" and "experiential" aspects and a number of concepts such as experience, entertainment, performance, emotional commitment have begun to be emphasized. The service sectors, such as the retail sector, which will provide experience during shopping, have been the pioneers of experience marketing. Consumers want to spend "quality time" in the limited time they spend on shopping. However, consumers also want to achieve meaningful experiences that are integrated with the community and culture they live in through experiential retailing practices offered by retailers. Retailers have realized that they need to focus on implementing experiential retailing in order to be able to effectively compete and differentiate in today's competitive retail market. The internet that has entered our life in recent years, has changed businesses's the way of doing business, especially retailers with the web, retailers are now able to reach much more easily markets that they can not reach with new sales channels and thus they can find new customers. Along with diversification of distribution channels, retailers who want to use more than one distribution channel at the same time tend to multichannel retailing strategies and which enables customers to experience flow experience with experiential retailing applications is crucial for the creation of customer satisfaction and for the purchase intentions of the customers and brand image. The aim of this study is to determine the validity of the dimensions that constitute the retail store and flow experiences of the consumers for three different retail sales channels (physical, online and mobile) and to determine the effects of experiential dimensions on channel satisfaction and purchasing intention. In line with the stated purpose, data were collected by taking face-to-face questionnaires to 1204 consumers residing in the city center of Ankara and shopping at ZARA's online, mobile and store located in Ankamall Shopping Center. One-way analysis of variance, exploratory factor analysis, partial least squares structural equation model analysis and finally manova analysis was applied to the obtained data. According to the results of the analysis, in terms of store sales channels, It has been found that the size of the store experience is the online store sales channel of the retail store sales channel, which has the highest impact on the flow experience dimensions. It has been found that the channel where the store experience dimensions have the highest effect on store satisfaction and purchasing intention is the online store sales channel. It has been found that the channel where the flow experience dimensions have the highest effect on store satisfaction and purchasing intention is the mobile store sales channel. It has been determined that the channel where the satisfaction of the store has the highest effect on the purchase intention is the online store sales channel.