The impact of store atmospherics and store layout on customer behavior in a hardware store retail setting : case: do-it-yourself store

Comprehensive apprehension of retail establishment’s atmosphere’s effects on its cus-tomers’ overall perceptions of the store and thus purchasing behavior is an essential goal for any retailer, yet the previous marketing literature has converged on understanding the shopping environments of mostly malls, grocery stores, furniture stores and clothing stores. A window was left open for construing a wholly different shopping environment; DIY (do-it-yourself)/ hardware/ home improvement store. Shopping environment studies rely largely on environmental psychology theories in their attempts of deciphering the effects of environment on individuals. This study is fundamentally similar in nature, by exploiting an application of stimulus-organism-response paradigm to retail context. Understanding how the stimuli (components of sur-rounding environment) affect the organisms (customers) and ultimately their responses (customers’ purchase behavior) are at the core of this study. This study attempts to iden-tify the current stimuli’s effects and to find possible nodes for development. Moreover, this study sheds light upon typical DIY-store customers’; shopping motives and goals, store atmospherics’ (i.e. layout design, human variables, general interior) effects on cus-tomers’ shopping paths, impulse buying, satisfaction and general perceptions of the store. To compile the vast stream of studies around the topic, a framework of re-applied S-O-R model is presented and thus tested in a Kodin Terra DIY store. Semi-structured customer interviews and direct observation of shopper movement were applied to explicate these phenomena. The results reveal the similarities and contrasts with the existing literature, yet en-countering the same problems as many of the previous studies do, i.e. the issue of gen-eralizability of the results. However, the results bring about practical solutions for en-hancing the shopping experience in Finnish hardware retailing sector, and in the select-ed case company especially