by Julio Alfonso González Mendoza1, Héctor Hugo Mora Franco2 and Onier Alexander
Pinto Torres
ABSTRACT
Unplanned purchasing in brick-and-mortar retail has received sustained theoretical attention under the
Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, yet the vast majority of empirical work concentrates on
digital, e-commerce, and livestreaming environments in high-income economies. Physical shopping malls in
emerging markets—where institutional trust is fragile and consumers must first assess basic safety before
engaging in hedonic consumption—remain empirically underexplored. This study examines how physical
environmental stimuli (hygiene, cleanliness, and security) function as baseline trust preconditions that
activate positive affective states, which in turn mediate unplanned buying behavior. A cross-sectional survey
of 549 mall visitors in Cúcuta, Colombia—a binational border conurbation with heterogeneous consumer
flows—was analyzed through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with bias
corrected accelerated bootstrapping (5,000 resamples), heterotrait-monotrait ratio (HTMT) for discriminant
validity, full collinearity variance inflation factor (VIF) assessment for common method bias control, and
PLSpredict for out-of-sample validation. Physical stimuli exhibited the strongest associations with unplanned
purchases (product quality r = 0.237; hygiene/cleanliness r = 0.225; security r = 0.212), exceeding traditional
marketing variables (advertising r = 0.082; staff attention r = 0.028) by a factor of three to eight. Affective states
operated as a significant complementary mediator (β_indirect = 0.038, 95% BCa CI [0.016, 0.068], VAF = 15.1%),
indicating that emotions constitute a real but partial mechanism within the S-O-R chain. These findings
reframe the classical flat reading of atmospherics into a hierarchical model with trust preconditions, offering
actionable evidence for mall management in institutionally fragile markets.
