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This paper aims to explore the evolution of the service environment literature and speculates about future research in this area. This paper focuses on studies regarding how the interior and exterior environments of physical service settings (including retail stores) influence consumer response. Web atmospherics are not covered in this paper. In addition, while a number of studies have been conducted on retail and service atmospherics elements in other disciplines, such as environmental psychology and leisure and hospitality, the focus is on research published in marketing and consumer-related journals.

This paper reports the results of empirical studies; however, as there are few empirical studies on the effects of exterior environmental characteristics (e.g. storefronts) in marketing, two conceptual papers on this topic will be reviewed to set the stage for future research on exterior design.

Over the past 40 years, there has been a proliferation of articles on how service environments influence consumer responses. The review covers illustrative examples of articles in several categories of environmental topics. The areas for future research based on the review are suggested.

An up-to-date review of service environment research that is broad in scope is provided. The authors also propose 41 different research questions based on the review that services scholars can use to take this area of inquiry forward.

The literature holds few contributions regarding the sensory environment of small, privately‐owned retail stores. Hence, this paper seeks to explore the sensory experience of patrons of a small boutique.

The study uses photo‐elicitation to examine the experience of the sensory retail environment of patrons of a small fashion boutique in the North West of England. Participants were asked to “show me how it feels to shop here” by taking photographs to depict their sensory in‐store experiences. Follow up interviews were carried out to explore the participants’ sensory experiences and then qualitative content analysis was used to identify the typical “likes” and “dislikes” regarding aspects of the sensory environment.

The findings reveal that it is not just tangible things that can affect a shopper's experience, but store traits such as smell, lighting and presence of owner‐manager can also influence a consumer's experience.

By providing an illustration case study, this paper provides a visual method for researching shopping experience from a sensory perspective. This research concerned small fashion boutiques. Other research as well as this study indicates that studies of sensory environments in other kinds of boutiques could produce different findings.

The paper is intended not only to equip small fashion retailers with an understanding of why some customers dwell and return to browse, but also to help them discern what it is that shoppers want to experience while shopping. Managerial implications are offered with the aim of converting patronage into sales to support survival of small fashion retailers.

This paper contributes to the literature on small to medium‐sized enterprise fashion retailing and the sensory experience of fashion shopping. The identification of sensory touch points in small fashion boutiques helps owner‐managers to understand female shoppers and provides a handrail for thinking up new ways of improving shopping experiences.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of physical and social retail store environment, referred to as “storescape”, retail store attachment and employee citizenship behaviour towards customers on customer citizenship behaviour.

The research employed a descriptive quantitative, cross-sectional design with a self-administered survey. Data were collected through an online research panel provider from 415 customers of department and discount department stores in Australia.

The findings show social storescape predicts customer citizenship behaviour directly, and that store attachment mediates the effect of both physical and social storescape on this behaviour. Employee citizenship behaviour towards customers was found to moderate the effect of storescape on customer citizenship behaviour. In addition, the effect of both positive physical and social storescape was found to be greater in discount department stores than department stores.

In addition to highlighting the factors that drive customer citizenship behaviour, the study shows that storescape factors and their effect vary for department stores versus discount department stores.

This study shows the effect of storescape on customer citizenship behaviour. Drawing on resource exchange theory, this study is the first-known to identify storescape as both physical and social resources which can influence retail store attachment and customer citizenship behaviour. The study provides new insights into the differential effect of storescape in department versus discount department stores in motivating customers to engage in citizenship behaviour. Further, the study makes an important contribution by demonstrating the moderating role of employee citizenship behaviour towards customers.

Evaluative processes made in retail environments have been shown to vary between groups, particularly between men and women. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a hedonic or utilitarian store atmosphere leads to different evaluations depending on the consumer's gender orientation.

A pre‐test identifies hedonic and utilitarian store atmospheres. A main study uses an experimental design to compare the impact of these atmospheres on overall store quality, price perceptions and willingness to pay for products in these stores in function of the consumers' gender orientation.

The results show that hedonic atmospheres lead to higher quality perception, higher price perception and higher purchase intention among female‐oriented consumers. Moreover, female‐oriented consumers are willing to pay 32 per cent more for the same product when this product is offered in a hedonic store atmosphere. Retailers should consider carefully how store design affects evaluations among male versus female‐oriented consumers.

The use of students reduces the generalisability of the results. Future research can test the propositions further.

The results suggest that perceptions of store atmospheres are moderated by gender orientation, which is a segmentation variable that may be more relevant in today's gender‐blurring retail environments. Furthermore, the results show how value can be perceived from store atmospheres and transferred to products.

With the growing acceptance of organised retail in Central India, it is important to understand the impulse buying phenomenon and how it is influenced by consumer traits and situational factors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the combined effect of three consumer traits and four situational factors on impulsive buying.

Using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SmartPLS 2.0 software), responses from 417 hypermarket and supermarket consumers of Central India in the proposed research framework were analysed and validated.

The resulted values for the construct impulse buying tendency, shopping enjoyment tendency, materialism, person’s situation, motivational activities by retailers and product attributes show positive significant influences, whereas the construct store environment having relationship with impulse buying shows negative influence. Importantly, the findings also demonstrate that the gender moderates the relationship between various factors of consumer traits and situational factors with impulse buying.

The study develops a research framework with three specific variables of consumer traits and four variables of situational factors, triggers impulse buying. Therefore, there is a need to incorporate some other variables, such as interpersonal influence, consumer involvement and consumption patterns, so that more affluent insights can be obtained. The study presents useful insights to retailers, academicians and researchers, regarding impulse buying behaviour of Indian consumers in a still developing organised retail sector in Central India.

The study focussed on the combined effect of consumer traits and situational factors on impulse buying for the first time in Central India, as earlier studies focussed on impulse buying behaviour at the USA and metro cities of India.

The current context of retail is extremely challenging. Retail environments are pushing consumers to appreciate hedonic aspects of consumption. Retailers are finding new ways to offer customers something unique or special in order to encourage traffic to physical stores. People like to touch, feel, smell, taste, inspect, test and try on. It is a holistic approach that involves both emotional and rational triggers (Meyer, 2006, p. 1). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The basic proposition is that a shopper’s behavior is influenced by the environment. The environment (store) influences a shopper’s emotions and mood, which in turn influence the shopper’s behavior (Ebster and Garaus, 2011, p. 108). Mehrabian found a significant amount of research to back Holbrook’s findings that “emotion is a key link in the shopping experience” determining that consumers’ reactions within stores are based on their emotional states, which are stimulated by store designs (Mehrabian, 1977).

It is important to focus on engaging the customer both emotionally and behaviorally, which means that the communication on social media and physical retail stores should both excel in emotional appeal, and encourage various forms of interaction with the brand. Increasingly, success at retail is less about what the retailer has to sell and more about how they sell it. This is the new experiential paradigm shift in shopping. This will become even more critical in the future as success at retail will continue to shift toward how well retailers play to the emotions, psychology and feelings of the shopper (Danziger, 2006, p. 17). The need whether utilitarian or hedonic carries them to the store but emotions make them stay and shop.

Both utilitarian and hedonic experiences – whether they are derived from consuming products or total experience, including products, people, places and the environment – contribute in differing degrees, to the overall experience of consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate customer loyalty in the online-to-offline (O2O) model by conceptualizing and measuring emotion and cognition.

An online survey was used to collect 514 questionnaire responses. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Three emotional factors influence two cognitive factors, which in turn affect customer loyalty. The type of message source acts as a moderator. In addition to pleasure and arousal, dominance is a key factor of emotion. The effects of social enhancement and store environment on customer loyalty reflect the O2O model’s integration of online and offline environments.

The moderating role of the type of message source implies that marketers of brick-and-mortar stores can promote positive offline experiences to attract online customers and then encourage these customers to disseminate personal messages in their social circles. By attracting online customers through appealing m-services and retaining these customers through favorable store environments, marketers can maximize the utility of the O2O model.

Three emotional factors and two cognitive factors are conceptualized to predict customer loyalty in the O2O model. This study shows that the relationships between cognitive factors and customer loyalty are moderated by the type of message source. When check-in activity messages are sent by friends, the perception of social enhancement can lead to greater customer loyalty. In contrast, when check-in activity messages are sent by unfamiliar sources, customer loyalty is driven more by cognition of the store environment than by online interaction. The findings enrich existing knowledge of the O2O model and m-services, and have implications for researchers and marketers.

The purpose of this paper is to discover user-generated visual merchandising (VM) directives that could guide VM in physical stores as well as shed light on future development of customizable virtual stores for online retailing.

Applying a facet theory approach, our research involved consumers (n=145) in co-designing VM directives in a 3D virtual store in collaboration with target corporation. In total, 67 virtual shops in three product categories, i.e., women’s ready-to-wear, boy’s Cherokee, and men’s swim wear, were content analysed, along with written reports.

The research findings focused on the three facets of VM: merchandising presentation (fixturing, product density, manner of presentation, and product adjacency), in-store environment (layout and interior), and in-store promotion (signage). The research revealed the elements that these facets contain and the relationships between the elements. The findings suggest that retailers should design an ecological instead of a merely utilitarian environment; clear section identity helps shoppers find a sense of ownership and boundaries; and stores should also present a lifestyle solution instead of a merchandise selection.

The research contributes both original creations of VM directives and a methodical framework that moves the subject of VM from the physical to the virtual environment and shifts the traditional in-house function of VM to an open innovation in which consumers participate.

Browsing is a common consumer behavior, but it has not been researched extensively. The aim of this paper is to fill some of the gaps in the research.

Drawing on literature from different areas, consumers' browsing experiences, browsing patterns, and factors influencing browsing activities are empirically examined. A combination of interviews and shopping trips with informants to examine the issues are used.

The results show that browsing serves both functional and recreational purposes. Consumers vary by the degree to which they browse functionally or recreationally. Browsing behaviors are influenced by both consumer characteristics and the retail environment. Browsing is a powerful consumer information acquisition activity and has both desired and undesired consequences for consumer purchases. Consumers use various strategies to cope with the undesired consequences.

Exploration of browsing patterns and factors influencing these patterns suggests important managerial implications for enhancing desirable browsing and reducing unnecessary browsing.

The conceptualization and findings of this research contribute to two areas of research: consumer information search and consumer shopping behaviors in retail environments. An examination of the role of browsing offers an empirical extension to the information acquisition framework.

The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of the relationships between the service environment, service provider mood, and provider‐customer interaction. Specifically, mood is evaluated as a potential moderator of the relationship between the service environment and provider‐customer interaction.

A multi‐method data collection approach was utilized, including observation and provider and customer surveys. Hypotheses are tested using regression, ANOVA, and MANOVA.

Findings indicate that service provider evaluations of the physical environment improve in the presence of an appropriate ambient scent. Behavioral responses are also enhanced: providers are viewed as more courteous and customers more friendly. Perhaps the most interesting observation is that provider mood moderates the relationship between the service environment and customer perceptions of service provider behavior.

The only environmental characteristic that was manipulated was scent, and access was granted to only one store over the course of three consecutive Saturdays. Consequently, validity is threatened by the potential for impact of factors other than the manipulated characteristic.

Implications for managers include careful consideration of potential changes to the ambient environment; if introduction of an appropriate scent can be undesirable, other changes may also lead to unexpected results. Changes under consideration should be tested before implementation.

This research extends service theory by examining the relationship between providers and customers in an actual retail setting. Important theoretical contributions include: demonstrating that service provider mood moderates the relationship between service environmental characteristics and customer perceptions of provider behavior; and finding that positive changes to the environment can amplify negative outcomes.