Elisa B. Schweiger

King's College London | KCL · King's Business School

This research examines how retailers convey messages to target customers and facilitate purchase decisions in physical settings. To establish a clear organizing framework for communications in physical settings, the current article examines both how and why retailers communicate with customers. Specifically, the authors address “how” questions from...

Retailers increasingly use digital displays and projections to enhance traditional endcaps. With two field experiments, the authors investigate how the vividness of an endcap projection affects shoppers. The results indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between the vividness of an endcap projection and sales, such that endcaps with moderately...

Widespread, and growing, use of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled voice assistants (VAs) creates a pressing need to understand what drives VA evaluations. This article proposes a new framework wherein perceptions of VA artificiality and VA intelligence are positioned as key drivers of VA evaluations. Building from work on signaling theory, AI, t...

Purpose Artificial intelligence–enabled voice assistants (VAs), such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, are available in smartphones, smart speakers, and other digital devices and channels. Use of these VAs is growing rapidly and are expected to significantly impact purchase intentions. This article focuses on how the communicat...

That artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to provide significant benefits is generally accepted by both practitioners and scholars. However, the dark side of AI is less discussed, and less understood. In this paper, the authors first classify the wellspring of AI benefits in both B2C and B2B settings. In B2C settings AI benefits are prima...

This research highlights the importance of retailer-consumer identity congruence – the match between the retail brand identity and the consumers’ identity. Retailers can leverage identity congruence to forge meaningful consumer-brand relationships which will result in enhanced engagement, brand loyalty, and willingness to pay. The paper discusses h...

Risky energy technologies are often controversial and debates around them are polarized; in such debates public acceptability is key. Research on public acceptability has emphasized the importance of intrapersonal factors but has largely neglected the influence of interpersonal factors. In an online survey (N = 948) with a representative sample of...

This chapter examines how luxury brands should consider customer experience in a multi-channel world. Building from the customer experience framework and the store environment framework, we present a framework focused on customer behavior and experience. We then focus on three aspects which are particularly important for luxury retailers to conside...

A proposed design–ambient–social–trialability (DAST) framework for retail atmospherics broadens conceptualizations to encompass not only the in-store experience but also out-of-store experiences that the retailer can control or influence. In turn, it expands understanding of retail atmospherics to incorporate multiple retail touchpoints that a cust...

To remain competitive, brick-and-mortar retailers need to create unique, engaging in-store experiences, such that they evolve from simply competing at a merchandise level and ensure holistic retail experiences that encourage customers to keep coming back. In this chapter, we examine how the five sensory components – vision, audition, olfaction, tou...