Applying a Scale for Measuring Store Equity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Store equity is an important source of sustainable competitive advantages for retailers in today’s competitive environment. Therefore, retailers should work hard to develop and improve their store equity. Measuring it should constitute the first stage of the development process. The present research provided a scale for measuring store equity in KSA market. It first discusses the store equity construct and then describes procedures for developing and refining a multiple-item measurement scale for the construct. Scale reliability, factor analysis, and validity are then discussed based on an analysis of the data gathered from the Saudi market. The study concludes with a discussion of some potential applications of the scale.


Conceptualization of SE
The SE concept was derived from the concept of BE (Arnett et al., 2003). The concept of BE started to emerge and capture the attention of scholars such as Aaker (1991) and Keller (1993) who developed the foundation for BE research. Aaker (1991, p. 15) defined BE as "a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name, and symbol, that add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or to that firm's customers.", and Keller (1993, p. 2) defined customer based brand equity as "the differential effect that brand knowledge has on consumer response to the marketing of that brand".
Many researchers have built on Aaker's (1991) and Keller's (1993) BE models in order to develop new retailing concepts. For example, based on Aaker's (1991) model, Arnett et al. (2003) introduced the concept of "retailer equity" (hereafter "RE"), and Baldauf et al. (2009) proposed the concept of "retailer-perceived BE, and Londoño et al., (2016) introduced the concept of Consumer-Based Brand-Retailer-Channel Equity (CBBRCE)." Keller's (1993) model was used to develop the SE concept by Hartman and Spiro (2005), "shopper-based mall equity" (hereafter "SBME") by El Hedhli and Chebat (2009), retailer brand equity by Swoboda et al. (2016), and store equity by Saura et al. (2017). In this study, we adopt the SE definition developed by Hartman and Spiro (2005).

Review of Existing Store Equity Dimensions
There has been considerable attention afforded to the dimensions of SE in the literature to date (EI Hedhli and Chebat, 2009;Arnett et al., 2003;Baldauf et al., 2009;Pappu and Quester, 2006a). Extant research suggests that both store awareness and store image are a major component of SE.

Store Awareness
Store awareness is the ability of the consumer to recognize or recall a retailer's name or symbol, Pappu and Quester (2006b) defined store awareness as the ability of a consumer to recognize or recall a retailer among a relevant retailer category. If retail builds strong awareness it increases the probability that a retail brand will be included in the consideration set which simplifies the consumer's retail brand choice, making it a habit to choose the retail brand.

Store Image
Image construct has been conceptualized as a set of functional and psychological states (Mazursky & Jacoby, 1986). A functional aspect comprises physical properties such as merchandise selection, price, ranges, and store layout. A psychological aspect comprises emotions such as a sense of belonging and a feeling of friendliness. Hopkins and Alford (2001) added that psychological state includes factors such as atmosphere and convenience, while the functional state includes merchandize, price, services, and personal factors.
Researchers have classified SI dimensions in many ways, but price, assortment, atmosphere, quality, convenience, and customer services have been used by most studies (Mazursky & Jacoby, 1986;Kasulis & Lusch, 1981;Samli et al., 1998;Steenkamp & Wedel, 991;Burt & Carralero-Encinas, 2000;Ailawadi & Keller, 2004;El Hedhli & Chebat, 2009;Swoboda et al., 2016). Our model includes three major dimensions of SI; the store atmosphere, store convenience, and merchandise. These dimensions include both the objective and subjective attributes retailers should consider when formulating marketing strategy (Kasulis & Lusch, 1981 There are many factors that are related to convenience such as the location of a store, the distance the consumer must travel to shop there, adequate parking, shopping effort, working hours, and quick checkout (Ailawadi and Keller, 2004;Delgado-Ballester et al., 2014;Samli et al., 1998). Moreover, the perceived convenience results from the perceived savings of time and effort during the shoping trip, including the stages of search for a product, evaluation, acquisition, and use convenience (Emrich et al., 2015).

Scale Item Generation
The initial items were selected from the study's literature review. These initial 86 items for measuring the SE dimensions are listed in Appendix A. The items were measured using a five-item Likert scale (1= "strongly disagree"; 5 = "strongly agree"; Jenkins & Taber, 1977;Lissitz & Green, 1975). After the scale items were generated, the initial item pool was edited to eliminate ambiguous and redundant items. The set of 86 items was submitted to five judges with PhDs in marketing. Statements that did not clearly fit into their category or were considered redundant or ambiguous were eliminated. This review eliminated 16 items; therefore, 70 items remained.
To refine the scale further, the remaining 70 items were sent to 40 experts in research methodology. The data were collected through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, considered an effective data-collection platform (Kees et al., 2017;Smith et al., 2016). This second review produced the same number of items. Therefore, 70 statements were used in the preliminary form of the SE scale.
Initially, we implemented this scale in the US market. Twenty eight items of SE scale captures in a reliable and valid way two main dimensions of SE; awareness and store image, the latter dimension consists of merchandize, atmosphere, and convenience. The scale was internally consistent and reliable.

Scale Purification and Dimensionality
This stage involved examining the dimensionality of the construct and assessing its reliability. Data were gathered from a sample of 544 adult respondents (18 years of age or older) in KSA. The sample size of 544 meets the requirement of around 20 observations per scale item (Hair et al., 2009). Four KSA department stores were selected for data collection (City Max, Harvey Nichols, Debenhas, and Centerpoint), for two reasons: to include stores that offer both moderate-and high-price items, and to ensure coverage of stores that offer both luxury and trendy products.
Coefficient alpha was used to measure the internal consistency of the set of items (Churchill, 1979;Peter, 1979). The alpha was 0.899, which indicated a high level of internal consistency (Hair et al., 2009;Nunnally, 1978); therefore, no items were deleted from the scale.
The 28 items were subjected to EFA with principal components estimation and Varimax rotation using SPSS 22. A strict loading criterion (0.6) was used to evaluate the Varimax rotated factors (Brakus et al., 2009;El Hehhli & Chebat, 2009). As a result, 28 items fulfilled the criterion, and eight factors represented distinct dimensions that were easy to interpret: factor 1 (music), factor 2 (lighting), factor 3 (layout), factor 4 (customer services), factor 5 (price), factor 6 (perceived quality), factor 7 (convenience), and factor 8 (awareness). Hair et al. (2009) provide four criteria for assessing factor loadings: (1) a statistically significant Bartlett's test of sphericity should be significant (Sig. <.05); (2) the measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) values must exceed 0.50 for the overall test; (3) factors should have eigenvalues greater than 1.0; and (4) the communality for each item should be greater than 0.50. The Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant, the MSA was 0.867, the eigenvalues of each factor were greater than 1, the communality for each item was above 0.5, and 76.944% of the variance was explained by the eight factors. Tables 4 and 5 summarize the factor loading results.  The next step was to conduct confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). AMOS 21 was used to conduct CFA to specify the pattern by which each measure loaded on a specific factor. The first order was conducted for two dimensions of SI, merchandise, and atmosphere. The result is discussed below.

Merchandise
The results show that χ 2 was significant (χ 2 = 103.779, χ 2 /df ratio 5.462, p= 0.00), the GFI value was 0.956, the CFI value was 0.966, and the RMSEA value was 0.091. Examining the squared multiple correlations for each item revealed that no item had a low R 2 values merchandise.

Atmosphere
The first-order CFA analysis showed that goodness-of-fit was satisfied, the χ 2 was significant (χ 2 = 270.467, χ 2 /df ratio 3.22, p= 0.00), the GFI value was 0.936, the CFI value was 0.959, and the RMSEA value was 0.064. Table 6 shows the first-and second-order analyses of atmosphere.

Nomological Validity
This step involves testing a well-established theoretical relationship between the measured construct and other constructs (Hair et al., 2009). According to Arnett et al. (2003), Gil-Saura et al. (2016), Gil-Saura et al. (2013), andFuentes-Blasco et al. (2017) store equity should positively influence shopping intention and customer satisfaction. Consequently, to establish the nomological validity of SE, shopping intention and customer satisfaction were used as the dependent variables, while SE was the independent variable. To measure shopping intention, three items were adapted from Arnett et al. (2003), and four items were adapted from Gelbrich (2011) to measure customer satisfaction.

Theoretical Implications
This study contributes to SE research by providing a reliable and valid measure of SE using store awareness and store image dimensions (merchandise, store atmosphere, and convenience). Furthermore, It provides a scale that researchers can build on to study the impact of SE on consumer behavior factors, such as customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, word of mouth, and repatronage intension.

Limitation and Future Research Directions
This study is not without its limitations, one of the limitations was its focus on stores, and one must use caution when applying this scale to other shopping mall types. Therefore, additional research is required to validate the measure by considering different types of shopping malls. Another limitation was the focus on KSA consumers which might limit our ability to fully generalize the findings to other. Future research could examine the applicability of this SE scale to online stores.