Exploring customer attachment behaviour to sustain the retail industry in Malaysia

The effectiveness of customer experience management to current market growth and perhaps business sustainability has drawn the attention of practitioners and academicians. This paper aims to address the gap by empirically investigating the effect of service encounter, trustworthy promotion and customer attachment behaviour with the moderating influence of customer emotional experience and commitment.

The study has used a survey approach with a self-administered questionnaire distributed in a retail store intercept: a drop off and collect technique. A hypothesized model was developed, analyzed and tested rigorously using the structural equation modelling procedure.

The findings reveal that customer emotional experience has positive significant effects on customer attachment behaviour, but not commitment. However, consumers in general will look for the trustworthiness of promotional activities when purchasing both local and international products.

The novelty of this study is the contribution of original knowledge through the development of new findings from a new invention, using the practical tool of comprehensive customer emotion experience, with new dimensions, scale and model. These findings have important implications for future research directions and management of the local or international retail industry.