고객 신뢰 및 시장 반응에 대한 서비스 품질과 사회적 책임 활동의 영향

As competition increases in the retailing industry, retailers are establishing various strategies and plans to satisfy the demands of customers. Especially, better location, low price, value merchandise, and service quality aspects were at the center of strategic concerns in the past. Since it has become difficult to differentiate these factors recently, marketing strategies of retailers should be redesigned all the way up to responsibility activities. This study focuses on the social responsibility perceived by customers of retailers. In addition, the study aims to examine how retailer social responsibility affects the customer relationship quality including trust and market response of customers. Specifically, retailer social responsibility separated by abstract factors and actual factors are examined. In the research model, main hypotheses consisted of three folds: 1) the relationships between retailer social responsibility and customer trust, 2) the relationships between retailer service quality and customer satisfaction and 3) the moderating effects of retailer social responsibility on the causal relationships from customer satisfaction to trust. Survey method was applied to test the research model. The data were collected from the customers of department stores and discount stores respectively. They participated to answer the questionnaires by the mall-intercept survey at three department stores and three discount stores in and around Seoul. After deleting the questionnaires that had serious missing, 303 responses were used for final analysis. Above all, structural equation modeling was applied for the first two sets of hypotheses testing. Second, six times hierarchical regression analyses were applied for moderating effect hypotheses testing. The results of hypothesis test suggest implications to retailers. First, retailer should consider social responsibility if they want to differentiate their position in the market. The existing differentiating attributes that service quality could enhance with the activities of retailer social responsibility. Second, retailer is able to extract the higher level of customer trust from the activities of retailer social responsibility. By the role of social responsibility, moreover, retailer could foster the conditions that customer satisfaction affects customer trust. Finally, retailer should consider focusing on actual activities of social responsibility rather than the abstract ones. Even though most retailer social responsibility stays on the abstract type of social responsibility so far, retailer should create different types of social responsibility such as actually working on evaluation of customers. When adopting the implications from this research, retailer should be careful applying them. The data, in this study, were collected just from the consumers who shopped at two types of retailer (department store and discount store), because they are most popular retailer formats and their sales volume take 70% in high performer retail market of Korea. Even though it is possible to reflect the ideas of most retail customers, they just answered to questionnaire considering when they shop or purchase from the offline retailers. So, future studies could contribute to extend the implications from this study in terms of generalization by applying the research model to other retail formats such as online retailer.