Summary

Nowaday the Korean restaurant industry is in recession. The survival rate in the industry is 51.6% in the first year, 28.5% in the third, and 17.7% in the fifth, indicating more than four fifth of the companies are eventually out of business (Nam, 2017). On the contrary, the market shares of home meal replacement(HMR) and convenience store lunch box are showing incremental growths since last ten years. In this difficult market condition, it is important for restaurants to secure their loyal customers and attract potential customers to visit their offline stores.
One of the most prominent differences between a restaurant and its competitors including HMR and convenience store is that restaurant utilizes a place as a physical space for its business. It means that a place can be a starting point of differentiation strategy for a restaurant from other competing restaurants, HMR, convenience store and so on. By enhancing customer experiences in a restaurant ‘place’, it is possible to achieve inimitable superiority over its competitors, to enforce its brand image, and to cultivate strong relationships with its customers.
Debenedetti, Oppelwal, and Arsel (2014) proposed that customers perceive familiarity, authenticity, and comfort (security) based on the interactions in/with a restaurant which are possible through delivering the experiences of homeyness at the restaurant. The authors also proposed that these familiarity, authenticity, and comfort increase attachment to the restaurant, which is called as place attachment. Unfortunately, however, their study was qualitative research, thus did not provide empirical results by testing the conceptual links among these concepts. Thus, this study aimed to identify the relationships among these concepts using a quantitative method.
Place attachment is a positive affective bonding between a customer and a place (Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2002). It is cultivated based on accumulated experiences of physical and social environments that a place provides over a long period of time. Thus it is expected that an attached customer is more likely to keep a relationship with a place. The desire to keep a relationship with a counterpart is called commitment (Brown, Barry, Dacin, & Gunst, 2005). Although Debenedetti et al. (2014) did not mention in their study, consumer commitment is one of the most important concept in relationship marketing. This study tried to examine the relationship between place attachment and consumer commitment in a restaurant setting.
Previous studies insisted that the more place attachment, the more positive word of mouth (WOM) (Cardinale, Nguyen, & Melewar, 2016; Chen, Dwyer, & Firth, 2014). While similar to the concept of positive WOM, selective matchmaking is more active than positive WOM in terms of selecting the right potential customers and recommend a preferred company to them (Debenedetti et al., 2014; Pimentel & Reynolds, 2004). Thus, we can expect that selective matchmaking is more effective to convert potential customers into real customers than positive WOM. Therefore, this study tried to test the relationships among place attachment, consumer commitmet, and selective matchmaking.
As mentioned above, it is anticipated that familiarity, authenticity, and comfort perceived from the experiences of homeyness in a place will increase place attachment, and eventually enhance consumer commitment and selective matchmaking. Thus, the purpose of the study was to identify the complex relationships among these variables.
A self-administrated questionnaire was utilized to collect data. Prior to the main survey, a pilot study was conducted to investigate the validity and reliability of the survey instrument. Thirty restaurant loyal customers participated in the pilot study. The results of the separate reliability test for each construct showed that the questionnaire was appropriate for the main survey.
The population of the study was loyal restaurant customers who live in Daegu, Korea and its suburban area. Data collection was delivered from June 3rd to July 15th in 2019. Mall intercept method was utilized to collect data. A total of twelve facilities including sports center, culture center, and golf club was visited to recruit respondents. Once a respondent permitted a survey, a filtering question was asked if he/she has a particularly patronizing restaurant. If yes, the survey was continued. A total of 400 questionnaires were handed out, 363 responses were returned, showing 90.8% of response rate. After deleting two responses for excessive missing data, 361 responses were used for further analysis.
To analyze the data, SPSS 25.0 and R studio program were utilized. Frequency analysis, reliability analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling were conducted to analyze the data. In addition, a competing model was tested to identify the best fitting model for the collected data.
The results of the study found that place attachment was most influenced by authenticity, followed by comfort. On the other hand, familiarity did not affect place attachment, contrary to Debenedetti et al. (2014)’s study.
Familiarity, authenticity, and comfort positively influenced consumer commitment. Among them, familiarity influenced commitment the most, followed by comfort and authenticity, respectively. In addition, place attachment had a positive effect on commitment directly and indirectly as a partial mediator on the relationships between authenticity and commitment, and comfort and commitment. It means that authenticity and comfort have positive influences on commitment directly and indirectly while familiarity only provides a positive direct effect on commitment.
The results identified that consumer commitment has a positive influence on selective matchmaking. Interestingly, however, place attachment did not affect selective matchmaking. Instead, place attachment influenced selective matchmaking indirectly through consumer commitment.
Overall, the current study identified that customer’s selective matchmaking is achievable only when consumer commitment is secured. Furthermore, consumer commitment is possible when a customer perceived familiarity, authenticity, and comfort. Also, place attachment based on authenticity and comfort is an important antecedent of consumer commitment.
Based on the results of the study, the conclusion explained the theoretical contributions of the study and practical implications that can be useful to restaurant managers. In addition, the limitations of the current study and recommendations for further research were explained.