Theorizing Islamic Retail Experiential Value in Predicting Total Islamic Experience Quality: A Hypothesised Model

The understanding of Muslim consumers behavior is essential for retailers to gain profit maximization, competitive advantage and longer sustainability as this group of customers demonstrate different personality compared to conventional customers. As such, retail businesses should adapt the Islamic retail concepts in their business strategies to tap the emergence of Muslim market and position themselves as the Islamic retailers. The conceptualisation of Islamic Retail Experiential Value scale is derived from the typology of experiential value framework reflecting the benefits of perceptions of atmospheric values (aesthetics), customer return on investment, service excellence and playfulness. The aim of this study is to examine the plausibility of refining the established Experiential Value Scale (EVS) by incorporating a new dimension. The proposed framework is based on the Stimulus (S) – Organism (O) – Response (R) paradigm (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974). This paper proposes a new dimension that is spiritual value to be integrated into Experiential Value concept, which will be known as Islamic Retail Experiential Value. This extended concept will be tested and validated in the context of Indian Muslim food outlets or famously known as the “Malaysian Mamak” food retail outlet. In this paper, it is proposed that Islamic Retail Experiential Value (IREV) will represent the organism element, and hypothesised as a predictor of Total Islamic Experience Quality(TIEQ).