Retail Therapy: The Impact of Therapeutic Motivation, Therapeutic Value, and Retail Environment, on Customer’s Purchase Intention

Abstract

As the number of people experiencing anxiety and stress increases, retail therapy might be use to reduce the stresslevel. Retailers may benefit from this situation by differentiating their marketing strategy, especially their physicalevidence. Previous research has concluded retail therapy as the mood-alleviative consumption behaviour.Furthermore, previous research also identified various therapeutic values and motivations that might lead to mood-alleviative consumption behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how retail therapy, both thetherapeutic values and motivations, and the physical surrounding, as part of a marketing strategy, may influencecustomer's purchase intention. Thewriter will conduct a survey and distribute the questionnaire to collect datafrom 400 shoppers in Bandung.Then, data will be tested usingdescriptive analysis and path analysis.Theimportant finding to emerge was that retail environments do haveanimpact on customer purchase intentionespecially in the ambiance and signage and have effect in therapeutic way. The result would be beneficial for bothacademic and managers since it will investigate the direct impact of therapeutic values and motivations andphysical evidence on customer's purchase intention. Moreover, managerswould have a new knowledge about partsof physical evidence which have significant impact to customer’s purchase intention.