A Study on Nail Art Service Strategies through the Analysis of Consumer Psychology and Market Trends: Focusing on Women in Their 20s and 30s

This study aimed to empirically examine the relationships among consumer characteristics, benefits sought, service quality, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intention among women in their 20s and 30s who had used nail art services within the past year. It also sought to propose strategic priorities for nail art services using derived importance-based Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) and service strategy needs analysis. A self-administered online survey was conducted with 248 female consumers aged 20 to 39, and the collected data were analyzed using SPSS. The analytical methods included frequency analysis, descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis, hierarchical regression analysis, and derived importance-based IPA. The results showed that consumer characteristics, including individuality-pursuit propensity, trend sensitivity, and SNS utilization propensity, had significant positive effects on benefits sought. Benefits sought and service quality also had significant positive effects on customer satisfaction. Among the sub-dimensions of service quality, treatment quality had the strongest effect on customer satisfaction, followed by human service, environment and hygiene, price-value, and design variety. Customer satisfaction had significant positive effects on both revisit intention and recommendation intention. The IPA results classified treatment quality and environment and hygiene into the maintain-and-strengthen quadrant, human service into the focus-improvement quadrant, price-value into the gradual-improvement quadrant, and design variety into the possible over-investment quadrant. The service strategy needs analysis indicated high demand for enhancing treatment finish and durability and for making hygiene and sterilization trust more visible. This study is meaningful in that it explains nail art consumer psychology among women in their 20s and 30s through the structure of consumer characteristics and benefits sought, and empirically verifies the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intention. The findings suggest that nail art service providers should continuously strengthen treatment expertise and hygiene trust while improving service competitiveness through human service enhancement and customer-tailored design proposals.