Store Choice Orientations and Intertype Shopping Behavior toward Grocery Stores(<Special English Issue>Optimization and Its Applications)

抄録

Reviewing prior studies about consumer store choice orientation and shopping behavior toward grocery stores, these three prepositions were supposed: (a) Consumers have many different store choice motives, but central orientations for store choice exist, and the orientations can be extracted in any regional area if representative samples of the area are selected. (b) The extracted orientations are basic characteristics that depend on consumers' variation of store choice. Therefore, the extracted orientations should reflect consumer shopping behavior and lifestyle values in the local region. (c) Consumers are clustered by the store choice orientations, and each cluster has a kind of homogeneous shopping behavior; especially, different store-type (intertype) shopping behaviors. The objective of this study is to prove the three prepositions (above (a)-(c)) in Japan. It was attempted to extract store choice orientations from consumer shopping motives. After that, consumers were classified by store choice orientations and the relation between the clusters and store-type choice behavior were specified. As many retail formats have been developed in Japan, most consumers can purchase the same products from a variety of retailers. Therefore, it should be considered that consumers choose a grocery store from different store-type alternatives. It would be meaningful that store choice orientations are concerned with the intertype (between different store types) shopping behavior. An empirical study showed that four consumer store choice orientations ('store quality', 'convenience', 'travel' and 'price') were extracted and four consumer clusters ('demanding shoppers', 'time-convenience shoppers', 'travel-conscious shoppers' and 'price-conscious shoppers') emerged by the orientations. There were differences in store-type choice tendencies among these four clusters, and the four clusters were different from the segments that were separated by the demographic attributes of age and household size.