The shopping experience itself is becoming increasingly important in today’s markets. As a result, a growing number of brands are opening pop-up stores. The focus of these time-limited stores is on the hedonic shopping value, which aims to offer consumers a unique experience and strengthen brand-consumer loyalty. In contrast, this study suggests that there is an effect on product-related rather than on brand-related reactions. Therefore, we first determined two central store-characteristics: time scarcity and hedonic shopping value. Then, by conducting two studies, we show by considering both short-term and long-term consumer reactions that only an effect on product-related reactions can be confirmed.

Introduction

Modern markets are characterized by stiff competition, which can at least be partially attributed to increasing online commerce. In the resulting buyers’ market, it is not enough to merely focus on low prices and a broad product assortment in order to convince consumers to favor a certain brand (Arnold and Reynolds, 2003). As a result, there is growing pressure on businesses to find ways to strengthen the tie between consumers and their brand. To meet this challenge, businesses are placing an increased emphasis on creating a special shopping atmosphere in order to offer customers a hedonic shopping value, which reflects the value received from multisensory (e.g., entertainment, interior design) and emotional (e.g., fun, pleasure) components of the shopping experience (Arnold and Reynolds, 2003; Babin et al., 1994). To this purpose, more and more brands are opening so-called temporary pop-up stores (Klein et al., 2016; Lowe et al., 2018). According to statistics from a retail marketing database, pop-up retail in 2016 was a 50- billion-dollar industry worldwide (Steimer, 2017). In addition, pop-up stores have even been used in the field of science, so a variety of studies have focused on the purpose and intended objectives of pop-up stores (Klein et al., 2016; Lowe et al., 2018; Picot-Coupey, 2014; Surchi, 2011; Warnaby et al., 2015). As the name implies, pop-up stores open suddenly somewhere and close up again at a pre-determined time. During the short period in which pop-up stores are open, they represent a point of contact for customers to build a relationship with the brand (Lowe et al., 2018). Accordingly, pop-up stores are a marketing strategy tool that may be implemented to strengthen brand loyalty (Spena et al., 2012).