Identifying price based determinants of consumer satisfaction in discount stores: Analyzing the moderating effect of self-congruity

Customer happiness and satisfaction have been globally accepted as critical notions for business success for decades. Recently, discount retailers have also noticed the importance of customer satisfaction to conduct an effective business plan. The discounter business is characterized by increasing competitiveness, more market analysis opportunities, and higher consumer expectations. These factors propose the essential nature of customer satisfaction. Price and price-related variables are well-known to be major drivers of consumer purchasing choices, however; their impact on consumer satisfaction, on the other hand, is unknown. Thus, the purpose of this research is to investigate the role of price-related factors on shopping satisfaction. Another purpose of the study is to examine the moderating effect of self-congruity on shopping in retail stores, with a sample from Turkey. In the study, data were collected using a 35-item survey which was gathered from various existing scales. The sample consists of 350 white-collar working participants who shop at retail stores and data were collected via the online survey. After presenting descriptive statics and reliability of the scales, as further correlation analysis, simple and hierhical analysis was performed to reveal the effect of different variables on shopping satisfaction. It was found that, independent variables were significant predictors of shopping satisfaction. Also, it was highlighted that shopping satisfaction was found significantly affected by the interaction term of independent variables with the self congruity. Keywords: shopping satisfaction, self congruity, price consciousness, discount market, hard discounters.