S05 - Session O3 - Factors influencing customer delight and likelihood to purchase again

Authors: Bridget Behe *, Patricia Huddleston

Plants provide a multitude of benefits for the end-user and thus the motivations for making a purchase likely vary. Beard and Ragheb (1980) developed a scale to measure seven dimensions of leisure satisfaction which was modified to quantify the key plant benefit categories identified by Hall and Knuth (2019). The literature suggests that delight with a purchase can lead to repeat purchases. Our goal was to better understand how plant benefits motivated purchase delight and repeat purchase intention. In 2020, 578 online responses were collected from a sample of U.S. plant purchasers who were asked to focus on a specific plant, after which researchers collected the leisure satisfaction measures along with three measures of product delight and three measures of intention to repurchase. Demographic information was also collected. Delight and repeat purchase intention were highly correlated (r 2 =0.674, p≤0.05). The linear regression with delight as the dependent variable was also significant (p≤0.001, F=19.677) with psychological, social, and aesthetic plant benefits significant, but not the other benefit dimensions nor any of the demographic characteristics. A linear regression with likelihood to buy again as the dependent variable showed that the model was significant (p≤0.001, F=11.306) with psychological, physiological, and aesthetic plant benefits significant, but not the other benefit dimensions nor any of the demographic characteristics. The differences in the models showed the social benefit contributed to delight but not to repurchase intention as the aesthetic benefit did. Retail implications will be discussed.