Predicting the overall perceived value of a leisure service : a survey of restaurant patrons in Pretoria

Abstract

Services are becoming increasingly important. Almost two-thirds of the world’s total economic output is accounted for by services. Moreover, the leisure services industry is one of the fastest growing industries around the world. The global growth rate was more than 6% per year in the last five years. The global leisure services industry is expected to be worth $3.4 trillion by 2010, with a growth rate of 6.1% for the 2005-2010 period. Marketers should focus on value-creating processes that involve customers as co-creators of value, because marketers cannot create or deliver customer value alone. Therefore, assessing consumers’ value perceptions can provide informative feedback that marketers can use to adjust their market offerings and meet consumers’ needs and expectations more effectively. This replication study investigated the application and relevance of Petrick’s (2002:119) SERV-PERVAL scale as a measure of consumers’ perceptions of service value in mid-scale restaurants. The SERV-PERVAL scale measures five dimensions of perceived value, namely perceived quality, emotional response, monetary price, behavioural price and reputation. The results should assist marketers to decide how best to influence overall value perceptions and favourable behavioural intentions amongst target markets through understanding how consumers make purchase decisions based on their perceptions of value. First, a conceptual framework of the relationships between perceived value and its antecedents and consequences was synthesised from the leisure marketing literature. Then the study surveyed students at the University of Pretoria and asked them to report their perceptions of a dining experience at a mid-scale restaurant. Multiple regression analysis was used to analyse the data. Two multiple regression models were tested. The findings provided support for the conceptual framework, as well as evidence for the relevance of utilising the SERV-PERVAL scale to measure the value perceptions of South African restaurant patrons. The significance of the two multiple regression models, analysed in the replicated study, was established. Seven hypotheses were tested. In only two cases, the null hypotheses could not be rejected in favour of the alternative hypotheses. The results of the first multiple regression model indicate that consumers' emotional response is the best predictor of their overall perceptions of value. Thus, mid-scale restaurant managers should enhance the pleasurable attributes of the service experience (e.g., background music; interior decoration and lighting; air-conditioning and scent) in order to enhance the consumer's dining experience. The results of the second multiple regression model indicate that consumers' perceived value is a better predictor of consumers' favourable behavioural intentions than satisfaction. An implication for managers is that they can increase their consumers' perceptions of value by enhancing the pleasurable attributes that consumers' experience, a well as the quality and the monetary price of services as perceived by the consumers. It is also important to maintain the level of the services' behavioural price and reputation perceived by consumers. However, managers need to identify the attributes that add pleasure to their target customers and understand how to employ them effectively.