Avaliação da competitividade no varejo sob a ótica do consumidor : adaptação e replicação no contexto paranaense

Abstract

The consumer has been studied in the marketing literature for a long time. The offers created by companies are addressed to him. Another frequent question in academic discussion is centered on competitiveness, which occurs when a particular company can gain a competitive advantage over their competitors, commonly used to explain the difference in performance between companies. However the main approaches of competitiveness and competitive advantage are focused on the evaluation of organizational aspects, or a population of organizations. As a result, the role of the consumer as valuation agent has been little exploited in this literature. Several factors influence the competitiveness of companies, and traditional forms of measurement, based on internal indicators, industry sales volume, among others, may have difficulties in obtaining the data, its truth or even monitoring. Thus, the purpose of this study is to unite the gains of consumer behavior and marketing field of literature seeking competitiveness through scale replication and proposals for a scale to measure customer experience, an instrument that enables the evaluation the competitiveness of the retail sector using the consumer as valuation agent. For this two steps were employed: a qualitative in order to seek indicators to compose the costumer experience scale; and other quantitative, which tested indicators set. The evaluation instrument includes eight dimensions, four of them from the Espartel (2009): Memory, familiarity, usage intent and brand relationship. Three other comes in Almeida (2014): trust, value and loyalty. Finally, the customer experience dimension. To compose the study were applied surveys to 301 consumers of electronics and department stores retailers. The results of the indicators set its show in ranking format and scales subjected to statistical tests of validation and confirmation. For this, we used the exploratory and confirmatory factorial analysis. The results showed is adequate for levels of unidimensionality, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity.