L’attaccamento ai luoghi commerciali

To enhance retail managers’ ability to attract more customers and sell more products, this study evaluated the existence, nature and validity of the concept of emotional attachment between consumer and retailer (so-called store attachment). This kind of attachment disregards the physical attributes of the place, or the satisfaction derived from goods or service purchased, and extends the concept of attachment to places (place attachment) to specific settings such as retail places (Borghini and Zach, 2006; Debenedetti, 2008; Vlachos et al., 2010). Since psychology suggests that the degree of attachment to an object is able to predict the nature of the subject's interactions with that object, the possibility that customers develop an emotional attachment to a site is very interesting (Thomson et al. 2005). Moreover, measurement of the store attachment would predict important features of the interaction between customer and store, allowing to identify those factors that determine loyalty, independently from the specific purchase act. The concept of place attachment in this work combines the two-dimensional design typical of environmental psychology (Williams and Roggenbuck, 1989; Williams and Vasko, 2003), referring to place identity and place dependence with the concept of emotional attachment within the emotional marketing literature (Carroll and Ahuva, 2006; Thomson et al. 2005; Thomson, 2006; Yam et al., 2008). In particular, a person will be attached to a commercial site if: a) his self-concept is congruent with the image of the place (store identity), b) that place satisfies that person functional needs (stores dependence), c) there is a feeling of sincere affection for that place (store affection). This paper raises two specific objectives: 1. determine whether store identity, store dependence and store affection emerge as distinct constructs, checking reliability and validity; 2. determine whether store attachment is a reflective first-order or a second-order construct, checking reliability and validity.