O impacto da autocongruência no valor percebido, na satisfação e lealdade em shopping center

Abstract

When collecting data from the shopping center segment in Brazil, revenues of R$198.2 billion are observed in 2019, wth shoppings being present in 212 cities, comprising more than 105,000 stores installed in 573 shopping centers in Brazilian territory and there is an estimate that more than 1 million direct jobs are related to the segment (Associação Brasileira de Shopping Center, 2019), which makes this segment relevant in the economic context. Therefore, understanding more clearly how and for what reason shoppers choose to be loyal to a mall helps managers in decision making, since, once loyal, consumers have a lower level of motivation to choose other business alternatives. In addition, the perceived value by the customer has attracted the attention of scholars in the area as it plays an important role in helping consumers choose, seeking to satisfy their consumers in order to increase their profits. The self-congruence theory is based on the concept that consumer behavior and responses tend to be partially influenced by individual comparisons of their own personality or the image they have of a product/service. When studying these themes, we notice a theoretical gap in the relationship of self-congruence with the value perceived by shopping center consumers, since existing studies have addressed this relationship considering stores or travel/tourism agencies as the object of study, and not the mall center as a whole. Furthermore, previous studies of perceived value in shopping centers considered only hedonic and utilitarian values, whereas the Mallval scale, which measures the perceived value in shopping centers and used in this study, analyzes the consumption experience more comprehensively considering the dimensions of hedonic, utilitarian and epistemic values, self-gratification, social interaction, convenience of time and space and the transactional issue, thus bringing its theoretical contribution. This study has a quantitative character, with the use of a questionnaire formed by questions extracted from four scales already validated in other studies, and was applied to consumers of shopping centers in the city of São Paulo. For the analysis of the results of this work, the multivariate statistical technique of Structural Equation Modeling was used, a technique that aims to test a theory of causal order among a set of variables. As a theoretical contribution, this study obtained the first application of the Perceived Value scale (Mallval) in Shopping Centers in Brazil, in addition to presenting within the context of the shopping center that self-congruence impacts on satisfaction only through the total mediation of Perceived Value. Furthermore, loyalty is only generated by a direct relationship between the environment and satisfaction or under the impact of satisfaction mediation, be it partial through the path of the shopping environment, or total through the path of perceived value. As a managerial contribution, obtaining a way to measure the perception of the Shopping's value, as well as the understanding of the model's direct relations and mediations, brings great value for the managers of these shopping centers. This work can be replicated periodically so as to become an indicator of which paths to reinforce and which paths to be corrected to raise the levels of perceived value, self-awareness, satisfaction and loyalty of its consumers, thus obtaining a better competitive advantage.