A Study on Grocery Retail Competition in the `Small Spatial Market' Setting and the Determinants of Different Levels of Customer Satisfaction : A Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis(fsQCA)Approach

This study aims at deepening our understanding of the mechanism through which a retailer's marketing mix impacts upon customer satisfaction via an exploration employing the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). It empirically investigates the configurations of retail mix components that determine different levels of customer satisfaction among the consumers who shop at one of the major Japanese minisupermarket multiples. Some of the results gleaned from the analysis show that the combination of `good merchandising' and `desirable store-location', together with `consumers' perception of these stores as quasi-supermarkets` leads to a very high level of customer satisfaction. On the other hand, two different configurations were identified that lead to a low level of custome satisfaction: the absence of `good merchandising' and `excellent service provision' in conjunction with the absence of `consumers' perception of the stores as quasi-supermarkets' was the first, and the absence of all three retailing mix factors was the second.