Abstract:
The supermarket concept has led to a renewed interest among shoppers in the
contemporary retailing context. The study was conducted to understand the
nature of supermarket patronage in the Sri Lankan context and evaluate the
motives behind the choice of supermarket patronage and how those motives
impact on customer loyalty. The study is quantitative in nature and the conclusive
research design was adopted. Customer survey was conducted to collect data
from customers who reside in two major provinces of Western and Southern in
Sri Lanka. Data were collected in two stages from two different samples to
identify the motives of supermarket patronage and validate the results. The
descriptive results provide valuable insight towards the different preferences of
male versus female shoppers in supermarket patronage. An exploratory factor
analysis was employed for the purpose of identifying key motives of supermarket
patronage by shoppers. The results produced three major dimensions which were
labelled as ‘product motive’, ‘services motive’ and ‘atmospheric motive’. The
structural equation modeling technique was employed to test the impact of
motives on customer loyalty. The results are decisive which indicate that all three
motives have significant impact on loyalty where the atmospheric motive has the
highest impact on loyalty compared to product and services motives.
