City Logistics and Citizen Satisfaction: A City Marketing Perspective

Abstract

In light of today’s globalised world and changing consumer needs, a rise of urban freight transports in cities is reported. Thereby, urban freight transports, also called City Logistics, entail attributes that citizens encounter in their everyday lives. These attributes can influence citizens’ perception of the city and finally, the extent to which they are satisfied with the city. At this point, common ground to the realm of city marketing can be found. City marketing is concerned with the perception of the city and strives for high level of citizen satisfaction in order to attract and retain valuable citizens. Within city marketing research, various studies exist that analyse the impact of different city attributes on citizen satisfaction. However, so far, no research exists that analyses the actual impact of City Logistics on citizen satisfaction. Following that, this thesis sets off to answer the research question whether City Logistics has an impact on citizen satisfaction. Besides, due to varying population size and freight vehicles density, the difference of the impact on citizens living in larger and smaller cities receives special attention. A quantitative research approach with self-completion questionnaires is applied to collect data from the German population. By means of an exploratory factor analysis, structural equation modelling and moderation analysis, it is found that City Logistics indeed has an impact on citizen satisfaction, which differs between citizens of larger and smaller cities. Moreover, the results reveal that the impact of City Logistics on citizen satisfaction is to some extent mediated by Nature & Recreation. On top of that, against what has been hypothesized, some nuisances caused by City Logistics do not directly decrease, but enhance citizen satisfaction. This thesis provides scientific contributions by developing a City Logistics scale, which allows the assessment of citizens’ perception of City Logistics. Besides, it is found that there is a difference in the impact of City Logistics on citizen satisfaction between citizens living in smaller cities and citizens living in larger cities. These results lead to some interesting point of departure for further research.