Servicescape interior design and consumers' personality impressions

Abstract

Purpose: The personality impressions evoked by service environments play a key role in attracting and retaining customers. This paper explores the interior design of service and retail environments, and links the designer perspective with the consumer perspective to assist managers in creating and managing interiors for achieving desired responses.Design/methodology/approach: The authors propose and test a conceptual model that relates types of interior design to consumer impressions of that environment's personality. Two studies establish holistic types of interiors based on design elements and factors with a sample of professionals, and then link those types to generic impressions evoked with consumers.Findings: Store personality relates systematically to five holistic types of interiors. Minimal‐shell interiors score high on unpleasantness, complex‐shell designs score high on enthusiasm, genuineness, and solidity, moderate‐shell interiors generate below‐average impressions of sophistication, genuineness, and solidity, low‐content interiors score high on enthusiasm and sophistication, and high‐content designs score low on enthusiasm, and high on unpleasantness.Research limitations/implications: This research is limited to wine tasting rooms as an example category. Implications for interior design in general can be drawn from the holistic types of interiors identified and from basic relations to generic dimensions of consumer responses.Practical implications: The findings reported in this research assist managers in more confidently using interior design for positioning and differentiating servicescapes.Originality/value: Integrating the designer perspective with the customer perspective is a unique approach yielding taxonomy for servicescape interiors, and a holistic perspective on their links with personality impressions.