소비자의 라이프스타일에 따른 서비스품질 지각 차이에 관한 연구

Abstract

For the last decades, service quality has been studied as one of the most important tools for a service company to compete with the other companies. Based on these past researches, it has been agreed that the service quality is a basic and powerful tool to create the competitive advantage. Due to similar reason, many service marketing practitioners have been also focused on the service quality to retain the existing consumers and collect the new consumers. However, service quality is subjectively perceived by individual consumers. Consumer evaluation of service quality can be different from each other. Especially consumers with one life-style may evaluate the service quality differently from the consumers with the other life-styles. Therefore we need to know whether there are differences in service quality perception on the categories of life-style. Life-style refers to a distinctive mode of living in its aggregate and broadest sense. It embodies the patterns that were developed and emerged from the dynamics of living in a society. Since the concept of life-style and its relationship to marketing was introduced in 1963 by William Lazer, methods of measuring the life-style and their application have been developed. Life-style has been usually used to segment the marketplace because it offers marketers a unique and important view of the market. When Life-style is combined with clustering methods, life-style segmentation can generate identifiable whole persons rather than isolated fragment. Life-style segmentation begins with people instead of products and classifies them into different life-style types, each characterized by a unique style of living based on a wide range of activities, interests, and opinions(Plummer, 1974). In this study we applies the life-style segmentation based on the AIO(Activities, Interests, and Opinions) to the consumers of the large discount stores. In Korea, the large discount store market has entered into maturity stage so that the market differentiation strategy is becoming a more critical issue to the marketing practitioners. One of the most important tools to differentiate from the competitors in large discount store market is continuously to provide service of better quality than competitors. This study tries to find answers about the following questions: 1) How can we categorize the consumer life-styles in the large discount store? 2) What are the characteristics of the categorized groups? 3) Are there any differences in service quality perception among the consumers with different life-styles 4) Are there any differences in consumer behavior among them in the large discount store? For the purpose, we collected survey data from consumers and analyzed the data with the SPSS package where we had -test, factor analysis, ANOVA, MANOVA, and cluster analysis. The survey was made during one month in the April of 2008. Among the collected 306 copies of questionnaires, 281 copies were chosen as the effective samples for empirical analysis except 25 copies with wrong responses. To identify the life-style patterns, we used the measures employed by Kim and Kwon(1999), where 44 items on a seven-point scale were used to measure factors of the life-style patterns. The Principal Component Method was used for factor extraction, and the VARIMAX orthogonal factor rotation was employed. The 7 items showing low factor loading were eliminated. The results of the factor analysis suggested that nine factors of the life-style patterns were identified as follows: 1) the equality-of-sexes and pursuit-of-independence tendency 2) self-management tendency 3) sociable tendency 4) self-display tendency 5) degree of a dilettante life 6) pursuit-of-information tendency 7) bargain hunter tendency 8) TV preference tendency 9) pursuit-of-leisure tendency. Next, after the K-means cluster analysis was performed with nine factors of the life-style patterns, the life-styles of the respondents were classified into four groups which are named as the 'progressive practicality-oriented group', 'positive success-oriented group', 'sociable ostentation-oriented group', 'stable conservation-oriented group'. The analysis results for usage behavior between the market segments showed statistically significant differences in the frequency of usage, duration time in the store, consumer satisfaction, and loyalty. Also, we tried to investigate whether the large discount store consumers differently perceive the quality of service based upon the types of life-style. To measure the service quality of large discount store, we adapted several measurement models measuring the service quality such as SERVPERF, BCP, R-SERVPERF, R-BCP. MANOVA and One-Way ANOVA were performed to confirm the difference in service quality perception based on the market segments. The results have also shown significant differences between life-style types in service quality perception. These findings show that the large discount store marketers should consider consumer life-style as one of the most important market segments for marketing and understand the difference in service quality perception between life-style types. Our findings give important implications to marketers of large discount stores as well as life-style researchers. First, this study showed there were significant differences in consumer's service quality perception and usage behavior between the types of life-style. It provides evidence that the life-style approach can be a important basis in segmenting the large discount store market and will make consumers perceive the service quality high. Second, most previous researches on service quality have been in aggregate level. However, our results imply that the future research on service quality have to focus on segment level. 近几十年来，服务质量已经成为服务型公司获得竞争优势的重要的基本工具，许多服务市场的营销人员已经把它作为保持客户和获得新客户的关注点。服务质量是被消费者个体所感知到的，这种评估因人而异。不同生活方式的消费者对服务质量的感知也不同，我们想了解服务质量的感知是否因为生活方式的不同而不同。 本研究基于AIO(行为、兴趣和观点)对大型折扣店的消费者作生活方式细分。本研究将回答以下问题：1)如何划分大型折扣店消费者的生活方式类型？2)每种类型的消费者都有哪些特点？3)不同生活类型的消费者对服务质量的感知是否有区别？4)这些消费者在折扣店里的行为是否有所不同。将通过问卷调查搜集数据，用SPSS软件分析数据。 用主成分法把消费者分为9种类型：1)追求独立型；2)自我管理型；3)社会型；4)自我显示型；5)业余生活型；6)信息搜索型；7)节约型；8)电视偏好型；9)奢侈型。接下来又用K均值聚类把这9种类型聚合成4个群体,命名为“积极的实用导向型”、“积极的成功导向型”、“社会化的炫耀型”、“稳定的保守型”。结果还显示在这几类细分群体中使用行为在使用频率、在店停留时间、消费者满意度和忠诚度都有显著区别。 研究成果显示不同生活方式的消费者对服务感知质量以及他们的行为方式都有明显不同，这就为根据生活方式对大型折扣店的消费者进行细分提供了依据。比以往研究进步之处在于，我们不是在全体客户水平上研究服务感知质量，而是在细分群体的水平上。以上对大型折扣店的营销者和生活方式的研究人员都是有借鉴意义的。