“There is no place like my mall”: consumer reactions to the absence of mall experiences
ISSN: 0887-6045
Article publication date: 23 March 2022
Issue publication date: 7 June 2022
Abstract
Purpose
How can the situation of shoppers staying at home and being unable to experience malls prepare retailers for the new marketplace? The COVID-19 lockdown provides a unique opportunity to examine the value of mall experiences to shoppers. This study aims to suggest a new mall experiences loss (MEXLOSS) model for assessing the importance of mall experiences as the foundation of any future strategy for attracting shoppers back to the mall.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 498 British shoppers completed an online survey during the May 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
Findings
When the exchanges of resources manifested in mall experiences are absent, the perceived difficulty of substituting an experience increases shoppers’ longing for the experience, which in turn increases both willingness to pay and mall loyalty but decreases well-being. Using a conceptualization of four types of mall experiences, i.e. functional, seductive, recreational and social, the functional and recreational experiences are shown to be the most valuable.
Practical implications
In the new more careful service marketplace, shoppers’ preferences are increasingly oriented toward health, safety, sustainability, collaboration and digitalization. To improve their resilience and attractiveness, malls need to adjust their layout, retail mix, digitalization, activities and connectivity according to these trends and to the characteristics of each mall experience.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to place a financial value on mall experiences and to use the absence of those experiences to assess their general and relative importance. The findings challenge previous assumptions about the superiority of online shopping and the decreasing attractiveness of malls.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dor Rubinfeld for his help in data collection, Tevel Mark for administrative assistance, Yaniv Kanat-Maymon for statistical advice and Dawn Schmidt for language editing. Finally, the authors wish to thank the Ruppin Academic Center for funding the data collection and additional technical aspects of the work.
Citation
Vilnai-Yavetz, I., Gilboa, S. and Mitchell, V. (2022), "“There is no place like my mall”: consumer reactions to the absence of mall experiences", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 563-583. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-04-2021-0118
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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