Did the Grand Renewal Opening of Department Store Enhance the Visit Value of Customers?

Abstract

In March 2004, Iwataya, which is a long-established local department store in Tenjin district at Fukuoka City, Japan, with lots of attachment from locals, made its grand renewal opening of its department store business with merged new two stores. The grand renewal opening this time is a drastic change not only in its physical renovation but also in its marketing strategies for reconfiguring its target customers. Thus it can be thought of as a social experiment to analyze what kinds of customers showed what types of responses and how they changed their purchasing behaviors and why. The purpose of this study is that, taking advantage of this opportunity, we investigate how the customers for Iwataya had evaluated its renewal opening of the New Iwataya and how they changed their purchasing behaviors at the New Iwataya. Specifically, we hypothesize that the drastic renewal change like Iwataya can bring to the customers the purchasing risk in the sense that while they surely could purchase the goods they wanted at the previous store, they might not be possible to find or purchase the goods they wanted at the new renewal shop. By focusing on consumers’ perception on their purchasing risks at the old and the new Iwataya, we investigate how the change in the purpose realization rate for each customer has affected the changes in the visit frequency and expenditure for that customer at the new Iwataya. To do this, we need a panel data, so in the questionnaire survey conducted after the renewal opening, we devised the question items which ask the respondents about their behaviors before the opening as well as the behaviors at present and obtained the retrospective panel data for each sample. Using the retrospective panel data, we demonstrated the empirical facts that the changes in the purpose realization rate of the store perceived by consumers are strongly related to the changes in their visit frequency to the store and their expenditure at that store.