Cristina Ziliani

• Ph.D in Management - Bocconi University, Italy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Parma

Purpose This study aims to advance knowledge of channel integration, a key feature of omnichannel retailing, by investigating the role of specific touchpoints in delivering a consistent integration perception. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative methods were adopted, by testing a model built on the stimulus-organism-response framework. Data c...

When designing a loyalty program, a major decision is that of identifying which rewards and of which nature (monetary vs. non-monetary) to offer. Customers do not evenly react to the same rewards, a fact that draws retailers to identifying segments that share a common preference. The present study adopts a generational segmentation approach to iden...

Purpose The study aims to propose a comprehensive overview of the Omnichannel phenomenon by identifying its theoretical foundations as well as future research directions. Design/methodology/approach In order to systematize Omnichannel-centered contributions and identify future research directions for post-Covid-19, this study adopted a mixed-metho...

Store flyers are one of the most important media used to feature retail and manufacturer promotions. Yet the body of research on their effectiveness on customer behaviour demonstrates significant gaps. We addressed this by conducting a field experiment with over 9000 members of a retailer's loyalty programme to identify what drives customers to rea...

This chapter will address the role of online customer experience and online touchpoints in the customer journey. First, Online and In-Store Customer Experience will be presented and discussed comparatively in order to highlight similarities and differences. Second, the chapter will focus on the role of online and offline touchpoints and their relat...

Purpose This paper analyses how the purchase channel and customer complaint goals affect the sequential choice of post–purchase complaint channels when customers experience a service failure followed by a service recovery failure (double deviation). Design/methodology/approach An online survey involving a scenario manipulation was conducted with 5...

Introducing a new online channel is a crucial decision for brick-and-mortar retailers that requires insight and forecasts into customers' adoption and subsequent behaviour. The aim of this study is to analyse the dynamics in the behavioural heterogeneity of (new) multichannel supermarket customers when the online channel is introduced. A Latent Cla...

Multiple studies have focused on Customer Experience and its relationship with Customer Loyalty. Despite such attention, two research gaps are still open with reference to the Experience-Loyalty link: the mediating role of Customer Satisfaction and the moderating role of consumer characteristics. This study employs a moderated mediation analysis of...

The importance of consumer touchpoints to brands and retailers is rapidly growing given the complexity of the customer journey, which is increasingly becoming omni-channel (Verhoef et al. 2015; Payne et al. 2017). Despite the increasing importance of touchpoints, the issue of whether specific customer segments encounter and prefer specific touchpoi...

Customer Experience develops through a journey of touchpoints. However, little is known on the role of touchpoints in contributing to customer loyalty, which is the final aim of Customer Experience Management. This study provides an examination of the relative and moderating role of frequency and positivity of exposure to more than twenty touchpoin...

This study aims to understand customer patterns of channel usage to voice complaints to multichannel retailers. Data were collected from multichannel shoppers for apparel in Spain by means of an online survey. Latent Class Analysis on complaint channel (store, website, mobile app and social media) usage was performed. The analysis identifies four c...

New promotional tools such as digital reward platforms, virtual loyalty currencies, and digital wallets are being introduced and some are being adopted quickly by consumers. These tools are increasingly accessed via mobile devices: for example, digital wallets developed in the form of apps. Despite the market increase in the popularity of new digit...

Purpose – The explosion in the number of touchpoints is putting pressure on companies to design omnichannel customer experiences (CE) aimed at achieving long-term customer loyalty. This work examines the relative importance of 24 selected touchpoints in contributing to customer loyalty intentions. Methodology – Data were collected by means of a s...

Nowadays the explosion in the number of different touchpoints results in an increased number of interactions between companies and customers within the customers’ journey (Hall & Towers, 2017; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016; Simon et al., 2016). Baxendale et al. (2015, p.236) define touchpoints as “episodes of direct or indirect contact with the brand.” Des...

Despite the increasing attention that has been currently devoted to customer experience, the relationship between customer experience and customer loyalty needs more research (Brun et al., 2017; Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). This study provides an incremental contribution to previous findings on the mediating role of customer satisfaction in the relati...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the patterns of customer exposure to touchpoints by segmenting consumers based on the frequency of their exposure, and to understand the relationship of patterns of exposure with customer loyalty intentions (relationship commitment, self-disclosure and positive word-of-mouth) and demographic charact...

Customer experience management is concerned with the design of touchpoint journeys with the aim of achieving customer loyalty. Most studies focus on the role of a single touchpoint or set of touchpoints in influencing brand attitudes. No studies question the contribution of touchpoints to customer loyalty. The present paper provides an examination...

The effectiveness of online versus offline promotional communication is an important marketing issue. This study estimates the effect of online versus print promotional communication on customer response. It employs a field experiment comparing the effectiveness of print versus online store flyers to evaluate the memory and actual shopping behavior...

Purpose. The explosion in the number of different touchpoints is putting pressure on companies to design omni-channel Customer Experiences (CE) aimed at achieving long-term customer loyalty. This work aims to provide a holistic examination of the relative importance of twenty-four touchpoints in contributing to customer loyalty to mobile service op...

The availability of new online channels has led to an explosion in the number of different touchpoints. This is putting pressure on retailers to design omni-channel Customer Experiences (CE). To develop CE, practitioners have started to adopt Customer Experience Management (CEM), that is a firm-wide management approach for designing CE (Homburg, Jo...

Store Brands (SBs) have been growing internationally over the last decades, spurring many managerial and academic studies. The present work aims to take a fresh perspective on SB by highlighting its role as a retail touchpoint within a Customer Experience (CE) framework. This study examines SB as a touchpoint, together with many other retail/store...

Availability of a growing number of devices for information searching and purchasing online is affecting consumer habits and companies’ strategies. This paper aims to understand device usage patterns in the online shopping process. The setting for the study is online shopping for Deal of the Day (DoD) coupons by young consumers. The study employs a...

Marketing literature has investigated coupons as tools that support customer acquisition and trial of new products for a long time now (Blattberg and Neslin 1989). With the advent of the Internet, coupons have become digital and major retailers and consumer goods manufacturers offer them online. E-coupon websites are platforms that enable consumers...

This paper contributes to the service marketing literature with a focus on deal-of-the-day (DoD) website shopping. The work explores drivers of adoption of DoD shopping among young consumers. We show that value conscious consumers are less oriented towards DoD while deal-prone consumers are more likely to purchase DoD. In contrast to previous resea...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify patterns of medium preference for loyalty programs (LPs) among members to support the case for segmenting customers based on their medium preference. Design/methodology/approach – A survey of nearly 2,000 customers who are enrolled in at least one supermarket LP was employed. LP members are segmen...

Objectives. The present paper aims to identify current patterns of CRM implementation among companies in order to investigate whether Best in class companies display higher economic performance and different characteristics with respect to other companies. Methodology. An online cross-industry survey was conducted on managers belonging to more than...

Store flyers are one of the key media featuring retail and brand promotions. However, the importance attributed to store flyers is not matched by an understanding of how customers respond to them. To shed light on flyer effectiveness, we employ a field experiment to estimate the response of 5000 retail customers to store flyers. We perform an Inten...

This study contributes to consumer behaviour and multichannel literature by exploring different device-usage patterns in online shopping behaviour. This study expands knowledge of device-usage by distinguishing between browsing and purchasing in the shopping process. E-couponing is one of the fastest growing and more relevant phenomena of e-commerc...

This paper contributes to consumer shopping behaviour literature with a focus on deal-of-the-day websites shopping. “Deal of the Day” (DoD) websites are platforms that allow consumers to purchase “in a social way”: a volume discount is provided only after enough people subscribe to a deal (or “e-coupon”). Students are becoming an interesting target...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the recent evolution of store flyers to illustrate how a tool of traditional marketing can be applied to generate insight on customer “couch-to-cart” behaviour thus supporting an innovating shopper marketing approach. The authors support this position by elaborating on three themes: first, the rece...

Loyalty programs are relationship marketing tools extensively adopted across industries. Digital offers opportunities for their innovation and differentiation but customer preferences for print versus digital elements of loyalty programs – communication, point collection, rewards, deals – are unclear. This paper aims to explore customer medium pref...

Feature advertising is perceived to be the most cost-effective way to deliver information that would influence consumers’ store choice. Retailers increasingly use store flyers as a common form of feature advertising. Promotions featured in store flyers represent two sources, manufacturers and retailers, who pursue different objectives—support sales...

Despite increases in promotional pressure by manufacturers and retailers to counter the effects of the economic crisis, promotional effectiveness is decreasing. Brands are reacting by experimenting with innovation in promotion, enabled by new digital channels, customer insight derived from individual customer information and new intermediaries. We...

Based on the analysis of trade promotion and motivation activities targeted to various types of channel members by suppliers in 14 industries between 1990 and 2010, this paper aims to draw a picture of the evolution of trade promotion practice. We find that loyalty promotions, i.e. loyalty schemes and clubs that have literally flourished in consume...

This research examines the determinants in building and maintaining customer loyalty in grocery retailing. The first part introduces a distinction between traditional, ‘mass’ levers such as range and price, and relational, ‘targeted’ levers based on individual customer information. The second part focuses on the role ofthese two sets of levers for...

Retailing in Italy is characterised by slowness in modernisation and internationalisation compared to the other European countries. The main reasons are restrictive regulations, especially governing the opening of large stores, and small firm size. This paper introduces the main players in the Italian food and nonfood retail market. The first part...

The paper focuses on consumer behaviour in front of emerging food risk factors. At the centre of the analysis is the relationship between food safety and consumption of a typical local cheese (mozzarella) following news of the "rubbish emergency" in the province of Naples, reported by newspapers during the 2007-2008 winter. The paper is organised a...

This work is concerned with the proposal of a segmentation approach to the retail company customer base founded on behavioural variables collected via loyalty cards. Based on two company databases, for a total of 278.000 individual customer profiles, the resulting analyses and Map are limited in their validity by the number of available variables,...

Making the point. The challenge of loyalty program effectiveness measurement - This piece of work is part of a wider reflection on the development of a loyalty marketing orientation among Italian companies: in such context, we decided to investigate marketing managers’ perceptions of loyalty marketing challenges, satisfaction with their own loyalty...

This paper proposes a new approach to measuring the effectiveness of consumer promotions, enabled by individual customer information collected via loyalty cards. The paper begins by discussing the complexity associated with measuring promotional effectiveness and the limits of current methodologies, then sets out to demonstrate that a customer-focu...

Loyalty cards are commonplace in European retailing; few retailers, however, are leveraging customer information to become more customer-oriented. The paper addresses the current trends in European loyalty schemes, drawing from data collected by the Observatory on Loyalty Cards at the University of Parma, and suggests that the real drivers of a ret...

The goal of this paper is to open the debate about the effect of customer specific retail marketing on competition. Segmentation and targeting based on loyalty card information affects horizontal and vertical relationships. Few retailers can take advantage of the power connected to the ownership of customer information. Consumers benefit from a mor...

The first goal of the paper is to define the concept of micro-marketing, overcoming the 'specialized' perspectives and definitions that have prevailed so far. Micro-marketing relates to ways of controlling environment complexity, facilitated by information technology and required by highly competitive markets. Such control has three forms: segmenta...

L’approccio customer-focused alla misura dell’efficacia della promozione al consumo (di Cristina Ziliani) - ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with the proposal for a new approach to measuring the effectiveness of consumer promotions, enabled by individual customer information collected via loyalty cards. Our research has three goals: 1) To discuss...