Exploring the concept of affective quality: Expanding the concept of retail personality

Abstract

Recently, there has been increasing attention paid to the affective side of consumer and patronage behavior. Whereas previous store image studies have focused primarily on its traditional cognitive or functional antecedents, this paper more fully accounts for a store's personality by considering its perceived affective, as well as functional, quality. A study is described which provides evidence that affect associated with retail environments is an important element in defining more fully the meaning of an environment in consumers' semantic networks. In addition, the study demonstrates a fairly strong degree of relatedness between affective quality and consumer perceptions of a store's more tangible or functional characteristics. Implications and extensions of this exploratory research are discussed.