The Impact of Physical Evidences on Customer Store Loyalty with Special Reference to Supermarket Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In Sri Lanka, when concentrating on previous researches on supermarket environment, the main focus has gone towards how far the customer service has affected on customer satisfaction or customer loyalty. However, other than the service quality there are so many areas to be looked at on the super market environment. There has been no such research conducted to study how physical evidences are made an impact on consumer behavior in super market environment. Therefore, there is a gap on identifying variables, which affect on consumer behavior other than the service quality in Sri Lankan supermarkets. Consumer mind is changing time to time but it is questionable whether that change is captured by retailers when designing their strategies. The overall study focused on whether there is an impact on the physical evidence used in supermarkets towards achieving customer store loyalty. This survey has covered the five major supermarkets in Sri Lanka. The sample is consisted of 100 customers those who are doing shopping at supermarket. To carry out the research there were four physical evidence elements selected such as layout, signage, lighting and signboards of supermarkets. Through the research findings there are several aspects of the customer store loyalty was revealed. One of those is present context customers are moving from general trade to modern just because of the opportunity that they getting to compare prices of the goods, quality and specifications of each products unlike in the general trade shopping. The next reason is most of the people love to have family shopping specially in supermarkets. Nowadays this has become a new trend in supermarkets.