Analysis of factors influencing consumer engagement in retail in rural and urban areas of Rajasthan

Consumer Engagement is the recent phenomenon in retail as the concept is being extended from the area of online marketing to retail market. This is also an emerging concept which needs to be developed as few researches have attempted to identify consumer engagement in retail. A research study has been conducted by the authors on identification of major dimensions of consumer engagement and the factors that influencing consumer engagement as well as these dimensions in retail stores.

The research objective of the study was to identify the major factors influencing consumer engagement in retail in rural and urban areas of Rajasthan.

An elicitation study was conducted initially to identify the major factors that are likely to influence consumer behavior in retail stores and 13 major factors were identified as a result of these elicitation studies. A sample size of 720 respondents were chosen with 360 respondents from six major cities of Rajasthan and 360 respondents from rural areas nearby these six cities. Regression Analysis and Anova Test was conducted to assess the impact of these factors on consumer engagement and its four major constructs/dimensions

The researcher attempted to identify whether these factors have a significant influence on consumer engagement in rural and urban areas of Rajasthan. A regression analysis was conducted to assess the significance of impact of these factors on consumer engagement and its dimensions and as a result, the major factors identified to have a significant impact on consumer engagement in urban areas are Product Variety, Discounts, Air-conditioning facilities, Music and Product Displays and the factors that were identified to have a significant impact on consumer engagement in rural areas are Product Display, Discounts, Credit/Debit card facility and Fun and Entertainment.

Therefore, the common factors that influence consumer engagement in rural as well as urban areas are discounts and product displays which depicts that consumers in the state of Rajasthan in India are more price sensitive and are more value conscious for the product to be displayed depicting a higher value for money.