Do the different store formats of the same brand matter to Chinese customers? An International study on a Japanese fashion brand

Many retailers have recently been building a greater variety of store formats and attempting to provide a superior shopping experience through their store environment in order to increase the possibility of customer revisitation and customer loyalty. However, less research pays attention to the issue of how, and to what extent, the different store formats have on impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty building. In order to improve the understanding of the satisfaction–loyalty link in the context of retail internationalization, we survey a Japanese fashion company – Nice Claup – that segmented the Chinese market by operating multiple retail stores and each retail store plays a discrete role of cultivating customer loyalty. Through 388-customer survey data, the results suggest that while attitudinal loyalty positively and directly influences behavioral loyalty, satisfaction indirectly drives behavioral loyalty through the mediating effects of attitudinal loyalty. The implication is that an application of implementing retail internationalization with adopting multiple store formats on different types of customers and customer behavioral loyalty can be transferred by offering multi-brands store more effectively than the single-brand store in the Chinese fashion market.