The Mediating Role of Firm Prestige in the Relationship between Perceived Quality and Behaviour Intention in Customer Cafeteria Experiences

Customer experience is viewed from different perspectives as an economic, marketing, management, and competitive strategy. Regardless of the perspective, customer experience is a business strategy and a critical concept that plays a key role in firm success in the 21st century. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on customer experience as a way for companies to differentiate themselves and build strong relationships with their customers. This approach is based on the idea that companies can build emotional bonds with their customers by providing memorable and positive experiences, leading to greater loyalty, repeat business and positive word-of-mouth. To create these experiences, companies adopt a customer-centric approach that involves understanding their customers’ needs, preferences and behaviours and using this information to design and deliver experiences that exceed their expectations. This approach requires moving away from traditional product-centric or sales-oriented strategies and instead places the customer at the centre of the company’s operations and decision-making processes. From a customer-centric perspective, meeting customer expectations in customer experiences is very important in shaping customer perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. From an experience-based perspective, a study was designed by taking into account the expectancy-affirmation theory, which is a psychological model that explains how customers evaluate their satisfaction with a product or service based on their expectations and perceptions of the experience, and a psychological theory that predicts that meeting customers’ expectations from their experiences may lead to a change in customer behaviour. The study examined the mediating role of firm prestige in the relationship between the perceived quality of customer experiences and customer behaviour intention. For this purpose, data were collected from 230 participants who had cafeteria experience through a questionnaire. The collected data were increased to 5000 by bootstrapping (derivative sampling) through the PLS-SEM algorithm. The study found that store prestige partially mediated the relationship between perceived experience quality and behavioural intention (customer satisfaction/loyalty) but did not mediate the relationship between food quality and behavioural intention (customer satisfaction/loyalty). The study also found that store prestige mediated the relationship between atmosphere quality and service quality, and behavioural intention (customer satisfaction/loyalty). Subsequently, cafeteria management policies should prioritise atmosphere and service quality. These factors directly impact the store’s prestige, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.