INVESTIGATION OF PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT AS A PART OF MICRO DIMENSION IN RESTAURANTS: A STUDY ON LOCAL CONSUMERS
Abstract
In today’s world, restaurants are not the places where people only supply their eating and drinking needs by necessity, they act as business enterprises as well, which enable people to interact one another in terms of socio-cultural aspect. However, consumers’ demands have important impacts on turning restaurants into these roles. Even, the increase in the number of alternative restaurants has made customers try new restaurants. For this reason, restaurants do need to satisfy customers’ consumption-related feelings alongside their eating experience to make their present customers loyal and attract new customers as well. In other words, the factors such as aesthetics, ambiance and physical factors/drivers including seating place preference, table and plate evaluation of the restaurants that consumers prefer/will prefer is a must that needs to be used as a criterion of success by the restaurants. In this vein, this study aims to investigate the physical environment in the restaurants as a part of micro dimension. A questionnaire form was developed through scales, related to the subject, and field research was carried out. The study findings unveiled that there are positive significant relationships among the variables such as; participants’ educational qualification and seating place preference, participants’ income level and plate evaluation, participants’ seating place preference and restaurant’s aesthetics and lastly, participants’ seating place preference and table evaluation. The study also unveiled that the physical environment generally does constitute important criteria on consumers’ preference in the restaurants.
Keywords
Restaurants,, Physical Environment,, Local Consumers,, Erzurum
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