Examining the role of culture, retail environment and emotions in determining festival shopping engagement: An emerging market perspective

The study attempts to understand the role played by culture, retail environment, and emotions in determining festival shopping engagement. In the realm of culture literature, this is the first-of-its-kind study to link culture dimensions with festival engagement. The study has been conducted in two folds, the first study explores the factors related to customers' shopping engagement, and the second study tested the relationship between the factors extracted from an exploratory study of the dimensions of culture, retail environment and emotion. The finding of the first part of the study concludes that the style and appearance, safety, hygiene and cleanliness of the physical surroundings play a vital role to enhance the overall customer experience in service exchange. In the second part of the study, it was found that retail atmospherics (colour, music and lighting) highly influence festival shopping engagement. The results hold implications for festival planners and retailers.