Consumer Push Force and Compound Business Pull Force on Consumers’ Reaction – An Empirical Study on Physical Chain Bookstores

Recently, physical chain bookstores have implemented compound business into their business model. The main purpose of this model is to provide diversified products and services to attract more customers. This study uses the push-pull force framework (Smith, 1983) to empirically examine how the compound business model influence customers’ attitude toward physical bookstores. According to the literature, the concept of “customer push force” and “compound business pull force” are used to investigate if the implementation of compound business for physical bookstores influences the satisfaction of customers.
This study uses questionnaires as the main data-collection method, and develops measurement items to measure customers’ satisfaction and feelings toward physical bookstores. Questionnaires are distributed via Internet. Data collected by questionnaires were further used on statistical analysis to empirically examine the hypotheses of the study. The main analytical methods include reliability test, correlation analysis, factor analysis and regression analysis.
There are two main results standing out from the statistical analysis. First, although the habit of consuming books has significant positive impact effect on customers’ actual purchase, this characteristic has significant negative effect on customers’ feelings about compound business, which means heavy users are not satisfied by compound business. Second, although customer push force and compound business pull force have significant effect on customers’ feelings about compound business, they have no significant effect on customers’ actual purchase, which means customers’ satisfaction on compound business doesn’t react on the actual purchasing behavior. The study on this ground brings up advices about the operating of bookstores. The result may be useful to compound business on bookstores.