O perfil de clientes de um shopping center: um estudo exploratório com consumidores do interior

The study was carried out in a Minas Gerais' inland city, so as to get acquainted with the profile and habits of its clients. This research is innovative as it approaches as customer the citizen of an inland town. The objective of this work was to identify the groups of customers taking into consideration their level of satisfaction as well as their social-economic profile. The collection of data was accomplished through the application of a closed questionnaire to the probabilistic, casual and stratified sample of the population of the city being researched, resulting in 500 questionnaires altogether. Entering and processing of the data were performed through a Statistical Package for the Social Science software (SPSS) v. 10.0. The analyses of data were accomplished through the use of the descriptive and multivaried statistics (cluster and discriminative). Other resources provided by the SPSS software were also used such as crosstabs and frequency. As a result three groups of consumers were formed, so called a) sporadic consumers group formed by people with lower income, not assiduous frequenters of the establishment and displaying difficulties in evaluating the mall; b) regular consumers with higher income capacity who frequent the establishment twice a month and finding themselves able to evaluate the quality of services and products in the mall; and c) assiduous consumers, with higher income and frequenting the establishment more often, being classified as critical and strict. The factors which discriminated the groups were: cinema and recreation facilities, trademarks, security, cleanliness, live music, events, the food area and advertisement of the mall.