The Impact Of Store Environment On Consumer Cognitive Valuation

Previous research studies have ignored to investigate the impact of store atmosphere on consumers’ cognitive valuation, by focusing mostly on consumers’ emotional reaction and its effect on their behavior (Lin, 2004). With the passage of time, many scholars started giving importance to the process of consumers’ decision-making based on their cognition.

Cognition is the part of consumer attitude. According to Schiffman & Kanuk (2004), attitude composed of three components: cognition, affect, and conation. Cognitive component of attitude: “… the knowledge and perceptions that are acquired by a combination of direct experience with the attitude object and related information from various sources” (Schiffman & Kanuk, 2004, p.202).
According to
S-O-R model was utilized to study the impact of store atmosphere on perception of the consumers by many researchers.

The earliest research work on the concept of perception in store atmosphere has been done by Bitner (1992). It was found in Bitner’s study that customer would have emotional, perceptional and psychological reactions towards the store environment, which affects their behavior in the retail store.

The importance of cognitive responses affecting behaviour has been highlighted in numerous studies. It is said that from the cognitive perspective, elements of the store gives message or information about the store and the merchandise. In other words, we can say that store atmosphere affect consumer’s perceptions and creates image of the store of merchandise. These percpetions direct the cosumers to exhibit approach-avoidance behaviour. Music played in the store was found to affect the consumers’ percpetion about the quality of fashion merchandise in the women’s fashion store context (Sweeney and Wyber; 2002). Also the ambient factors of the store are been found to affect the consumers’ behaviour. Chebat and Michon (2003), found that the ambient scent influenced consumers to spend more based on their congnitive
(1994), perceived risk for the purchase of clothes was found to be more in online shopping compared to offline shopping. Also perceived risk is related to mode of shopping to a great extent. According to Cox et al. (1967), perceived risk is low in mail catalog or telephone shopping compared to in-store shopping.
According to Srinivasan and Ratchford (1991), shopping experience influence the level of perceived risk for the shoppers. They stated that positive shopping experience leads to low level of perceived risk and negative shopping experience leads to high level of perceived risk. In other words, we can say that shopping experience plays an important role in affecting the perceived risk of the shoppers during purchasing.
Donovan et al (1994) stated that emotions greatly affect some type of behavior, while cognition is found to affect other type of behavior. It was proved in their study that cognitive factors are more important than emotional factors for investigating the unplanned spending of the consumers.

This is supported by the study of Lee and Yi (2008, which states that arousal and perceived risk significantly affects the impulsive buying behavior. In particular, it was proved that perceived risk is negatively associated with impulsive buying