Retail Store Managers and their Customers: Are their Perceptions of the Shopping Experience Congruent or Disparate?

The design and offering of shopping experiences could be seen as efforts to create emotional connection with customers through careful planning of tangible and intangible elements. This study measured the perceptions of 316 store managers as well as those of 300 customers' to determine to what extent their measured perceptions of a shopping experience are similar. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and reliability analyses were undertaken. The CFA analyses produced two models with good fit indices but different shopping experience factors for managers and customers. The findings are that customers differ from store managers in respect of what constitute a positive shopping experience. The strongest relationship between any dimension of the shopping experience and customer satisfaction is store location for the customers and staff competence for store managers.