Search results

There have been significant developments in the field of retailing with digitalization. One of these developments is the emergence of omnichannel retailing. Although this has affected both firms and consumers considerably, the literature is dominated by the studies dealing with omnichannel retailing from the firms’ perspectives. The studies dealing with omnichannel retailing from the consumers’ perspectives have recently begun to attract the attention of researchers. For this reason, this study conducted a literature review to examine various consumer behaviors mentioned in the studies aimed at explaining consumer behaviors in the omnichannel retailing context. The distribution of these studies according to years and journals, research methods used, theories adopted, and the related five-stage consumer decision-making stages are summarized. Additionally, this review addresses future research avenues.

The aim of this paper is to look beyond the application of quality management controls, assurances and standards which have already been widely addressed in the quality literature. Instead, the focus is on quality in management performance, particularly in relation to effective decision making and the resultant marketing activity against a background of organisational variables and environmental change. Some of the influences on management development are considered. These include: the effect of the organisational structure on managerial decision making; the nature of decision making within organisations; individual responsibility for planning and implementation; and continual managerial development. These aspects are then illustrated using a brief case description of a large multinational company offering a consumer service. The description illustrates the importance of developing the key decision makers in an organisation, particularly in relation to the changing and evolving nature of responsibilities and tasks required from them.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how firms may be segmented with respect to their attitudes towards the use of mobile instant messaging (MIM) apps (e.g. WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, etc). in their marketing practices to identify the main approaches to the use of MIM in business. Moreover, this paper identifies the key factors which can motivate or hinder the adoption of these digital platforms.

Firms are segmented on the basis of their attitudes (perceived usefulness and perceived effectiveness of performance) towards the use of MIM apps in the business. Categories for size, age of the firm and the organization’s predisposition towards MIMs are explored using data from 311 firms and latent class analysis. Threats, triggers and their real usage are also identified to describe the different approaches towards the application of MIM apps in marketing practices.

Four clusters are identified – lukewarm, cold, believer and unaffected – along with significant covariates such as the importance of conversation with the client, the use of MIMs in the business, the threats and triggers that can foresee adherence. The results help to understand how to approach the client using social messenger applications. MIM apps can be used for strategic marketing and not only for operative marketing.

This paper offers a more nuanced understanding of how firms engage through MIM apps by focusing on the firms’ attitudes towards MIM apps. It extends the knowledge on the firms’ reactions to these disruptive technologies and profiles the firms according to their social innovation attitudes, something that has not yet been investigated in the extant marketing literature.

While e-commerce has been widely cited as the new marketing frontier, thus necessitating the need to deliver seamless shopping experiences across various online channels to achieve success, very few firms have the well withal to clearly tie customer experience investments to marketing outcomes. Theoretically speaking, the understanding of the drivers and outcomes of online shopping experience especially group behavior is imprecise. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the drivers and outcomes of online shopping experience (OSE).

A combination of netnography and conversation analysis was used on a pool of qualitative data generated from the Facebook page of a leading online retailer that has online presence in 11 African countries.

Two broad categories of OSE under seven drivers and five distinct behavioral outcomes of OSE emerged from the study. The two categories of OSE drivers, though unique, widely fit into the existing frameworks of OSE. The study also indicates that shoppers seize other shoppers’ reviews as a suitable platform to engage in a wide range of behaviors.

The main theoretical implications include the following: complaint handling is not only a behavioral construct but also a stimulator/driver of online shopping experience; consumer behavior is stimulated more by cognitive drivers; trust is an outcome of OSE which leads to not only electronic word of mouth but also external response to service failure; and shoppers perceive external response to service failure as the last resort and this last resort can be activated by regrets and poor internal response to service failure. The major limitation of this study is that the proposed conceptual model was not empirically tested. Future research is required to validate the model.

The managerial implications of the findings are that in addition to providing superior shopping experience through enhancing the drivers of OSE identified in this study, online retailers must work assiduously to reduce incidents leading to service failures and promptly undertake service recovery actions whenever service failure occurs. Online retailers especially those operating in emerging markets will therefore benefit from their service recovery investments if they proactively install processes that enable them to promptly and satisfactorily recover failed services.

This paper contributes to service science research by proposing a unique belief-attitude-intention model of the drivers and outcomes of OSE on a relatively underexplored field. The proposed conceptual model advances the stimulus-organism-response framework, theory of planned behavior, satisfaction theories and shopping behavior literature in several directions.

Consumer marketing companies have lavished more resources on attracting new customers than on satisfying old customers. In today's low growth and highly competitive marketplace, however, customer retention increasingly joins customer getting as an important area of analysis and planning. Marketers can better cultivate relationships with existing customers in these ways: designing an optimal customer portfolio, formulating a special marketing mix, and modifying the marketing organization. The balancing of marketing efforts between winning new customers and holding onto old ones will prove instrumental in pursuing sales and profit growth in the 1980s.

The purpose of the paper is to systematically review and summarize the literature addressing various sources of online brand equity. The evolution of social media, online forums and virtual communities drive the diversity in nomenclature of online marketing variables. Different researchers have used different marketing variables to indicate the same source of online brand equity. The definitions of the marketing variables change with the change in context, due to the complex e-commerce environment. The marketing variables used in different studies have lead to a conceptual overlap and repetitiveness.

This confusion is sought to be classified by the proposed classificatory scheme that used content analysis of 42 previous studies. The definitions of the antecedents of sources of the online brand equity used by the authors are analyzed with the help of content analysis to summarize the marketing variables in a meaningful way.

The paper identifies 15 major marketing variables by authors in their studies related to various sources of online brand equity. The final list contains 13 frequently used variables which also comprises variables which are evolving due to the dynamic e-commerce environment like the feeling of “virtual-real”.

The variables identified can be used by the businesses as a check list to their marketing activities.

This is the first paper which identifies and clarifies the ambiguity present in the application of the various online marketing variables.

This paper aims to analyze the concept of customer experience in the marketing literature, identify its dimensions and applications in retail companies and integrate it with the concepts of touchpoints and consumer journey; some correlated concepts, such as customer delight and engagement, are also clarified, and an example of best practice customer experience management, using the beauty product company Sephora as a reference is provided.

The case analysis was based on an examination of available public documents, such as press articles, case studies and the content of beauty blogs and social media (Facebook and YouTube) from 2014 to 2017; Sephora’s social media communities (Beauty Talk, The Glossy and Sephora TV); the company’s website and mobile application; and physical stores and Sephora Flash (a mix of a physical and digital store).

Four categories emerged from the analysis, namely, to provide an enhanced omni-channel shopping experience, to reward loyalty and to bond with customers, to promote social shopping experiences and to delight customers.

The study results provide retail managers important insights for maximizing customer experience across different touchpoints and throughout the whole journey to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

The paper provides clear theoretical and practical basis for customer experience management, based on an analysis of the concepts of customer experience, delight and engagement, as well as a case analysis of a company that excels in this area.

Despite the now well developed use of sponsorship linked marketing, there have been few methodological advances in the measurement of sponsorship constructs and outcomes. This paper offers a preliminary development of an activity index for use in the sponsorship marketing context. The activity index seeks to capture the consumer's extended experience with sport (rugby) and considers the relationship of this overall experience to sponsorship-related outcomes of interest. Initial development of the index, based on a convenience sample of 108 people visiting a sports centre, shows promise.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the development and nomological testing of a 17‐item scale measuring the five dimensions of service convenience (decision, access, transaction, benefit, and post‐benefit) as proposed by Berry, Seiders, and Grewal.

A cross‐sectional survey methodology was used to collect the data.

Reliability and validity assessments provided evidence of the scale's psychometric validity. Service convenience was found to be a significant predictor of overall satisfaction in the context of personal cellular telephone and internet usage.

This study uses a student sample which may limit its generalizability to other respondents. Also, the cross‐sectional survey methodology does not allow for the investigation of causation. Future research should investigate other contexts outside of the cellular and internet services examined in this study and across a broader sample. Furthermore, the ability to retrospectively rate service convenience, the trade‐off between price and convenience, and the continuum of convenience need to be investigated further.

This study provides psychometrically valid scales to measure service convenience as conceptualized by Berry et al..

Suggest hybrid e‐commerce strategies can take many forms – ranging from approaches with limited interaction between the physical and virtual entities – to where these two modes are inseparable. Investigates theoretical strengths of synergy models, presenting a series of case studies that illustrate that some companies and industries have hybrid strategies. Sums up that contrary to the former e‐commerce rhetoric, distance is not dead and geography still bears an influence on e‐commerce retail activity.