WHAT DRIVES EXPERIENTIAL LOYALTY? A CASE STUDY OF COFFEE CHAIN STORES IN BANGKOK

Abstract

          Over the past 20 years, the rapid expansion of coffee chain stores has transformed the Thai coffee consumption landscape with coffee stores penetrating mass market to high end specialty and premium segments. This study aims to identify key components of customers’ experience and how it relates to customers’ loyalty among customers of coffee chains in Bangkok Metropolitan area. Based on the conceptual framework of Wu (2017), this study examined the drivers of experiential quality (EQ), namely interaction quality (IQ), physical environment quality (PEQ), outcome quality (OQ) and affective quality (AQ) and the relationship among Experiential Quality, experiential satisfaction (ES), perceived value (PV), experiential trust (ET) and experiential loyalty (EL). Gender was added as a control variable to identify whether there was a difference between male and female customers on experiential loyalty. An on-line self-administered questionnaire was distributed to target respondents, using convenience sampling methods during August-October 2018. Based on the valid response of 408, data was analyzed using Pearson’s correlation, Multiple Linear Regression Analysis (MLR) and Simple Linear Regression Analysis (SLR) were used to test the hypothesized relationship of all variables and One-way ANOVA was performed to test the mean differences. Results showed that physical environment quality and affective quality were the key determinants of experiential quality among coffee chain stores in Bangkok. Additionally, experiential quality was the antecedent for experiential satisfaction, perceived value and experiential trust. In turn, these three variables namely experiential satisfaction, perceived value and experiential trust were the antecedents of experiential loyalty. Results of this study renders support coffee consumption as lifestyles experiences and contributes academically to the linkages of experiential quality with experiential loyalty through experiential satisfaction, experiential trust and perceived value.