EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN STORE PATRONAGE MOTIVES AND PURCHASING OUTCOMES FOR MAJOR SHOPPING TRIPS IN THE CROATIAN GROCERY

Prediction of retail patronage has long been of interest to scholars and practitioners. For retailers, the importance of this theory is in gaining the ideas and knowledge of how to design the retailing strategy tailored to specific consumers’ needs and wants. The present paper examines the importance of store patronage motives for major shopping trips and explores how they are associated with purchasing outcomes and retailers’ performance. Questions addressed here were examined with data collected from a consumer and company questionnaires carried out in the Croatian grocery sector in 2004. Data was analysed using factor and cluster analysis, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multiple regression as well. The analysis produced 6 store patronage motive factors, shopping convenience being the most important factor for generating store traffic, and prices for enhancing monthly sales level. Four shopper groups with signifi cantly different shopping behaviour were identified. Since retailers’ sales level is determined by store traffic and not by the average spending per shopper, the retailers should focus to increase store traffic by offering the best package of store attributes and loyalty programmes, targeting each shopper group differently.