Investigating Overall Restaurant Image: Generalizing the Triggering Mechanism to Multiple Casual Sit Down Restaurants

With the competitive and complex nature of today’s general retailing environment, researchers and practitioners see the links between retail image, loyalty metrics, and financial performance metrics (e.g., profitability) as critical to better understand how customers form a retail image (Kumar and Shah 2004; Pan and Zinkhan 2006). Despite the growing research attention paid to the links between retail image and critical constructs (e.g., customer satisfaction, repeat patronage behaviors and word of mouth behaviors), little agreement exists on the nature of these linkages (e.g., Chebat et al. 2006; Dawar and Parker 1994; Hartman and Spiro 2005, etc.). The links between retail image and other critical constructs have been conceptualized as symmetric and positive in nature by some researchers (Dawar and Parker 1994; Hartman and Spiro 2005), while others suggest the relationship is asymmetric and non-linear (Anderson and Mittal 2000; Gomez et al. 2004). Given the different perspectives on the relationships between retail image and other critical constructs, an important question emerges- what is the actual role of retail image in creating retail/customer loyalty?