Managing the Shopping Center Ambience Attributes by Using Importance-Performance Analysis: The Case from Serbia

This paper examined customers’ perceived importance and performance of shopping center ambience on the examples of the Mercator shopping center and Sad Novi Bazaar shopping center in Novi Sad, Serbia. The shopping center ambience was examined through exterior and interior attributes. It was found that a number of them are very important to customers and their shopping behavior. According to the present research, the most important exterior attributes are: address and location, parking availability, congestion and traffic, exterior display windows and entrances. The most important interior attributes are: cleanliness, temperature, merchandise, lighting, music, scents, absence of tobacco smoke, width of aisles and P.A. usage. The paper also provided information for two studied shopping centers with ambience attributes that performed well or not and everything was presented on the importance-performance grids, which can serve managers as guidelines for further development.