Peter C. Verhoef

University of Groningen | RUG · Department of Marketing

We investigate the relationship between retargeting and other marketing activities on buying behaviors in a multichannel environment. By modeling three stages of the buying decision process, we find that retargeting influences customers to make a purchase; it drives purchases through the web and telephone channels more than the store but does not i...

In recent years, firms’ privacy practices have received increasing attention from consumers. While firms largely see this development as a threat, as consumers might prohibit collection or use of data, we suggest that it can also represent an opportunity for firms. On the “market for privacy,” firms can gain a competitive advantage by differentiati...

Small and medium enterprise (SME) digitalisation involves the reinforcement, modification, and renewal of business models with the help of digital technologies. It is widely considered imperative for SMEs to stay relevant in the digital age. Yet, little is known about the conditions under which SME digitalisation improves the performance of SMEs in...

Consumer information is an increasingly valuable resource in the digitally interconnected modern world. Globally, the number of firms collecting and exploiting consumer information to optimize their marketing efforts is increasing rapidly. The authors determine how four cultural dimensions—power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and lon...

Purpose The Covid-19 pandemic has a strong effect on societies, business and consumers. Governments have taken measures to reduce the spread of the pandemic, such as social distancing and lockdowns. The latter has also resulted in a temporary closure of physical stores for “non-essential” retailing. Covid-19 thus has a profound impact on how people...

In the hope of benefiting from the increasing focus on sustainability in Western markets, national brands are introducing new sustainable products. We investigate the success of new sustainable products with a unique dataset combining household panel data, consumer survey data, expert panel survey data, and advertising expenditure data. We show tha...

In this paper, I discuss some reflections on the emerging literature on multi- and omni-channel retailing. I discuss four important area’s of prior research and briefly describe some general findings. Next, I consider three important emerging trends: 1) digital only, 2) Covid-19 effects and 3) New Technologies. I discuss the implications of these t...

Attitudes, perceptions, and intentions of a firm's customers, which can be captured via customer feedback metrics (CFMs), provide valuable information about the state of a firm's customer base. CFMs can help capture the impact of marketing actions on future customer behavior and future firm performance, and thus can help make marketing become more...

Although collecting personal information about consumers is crucial for firms and marketers, understanding of when and why consumers accept or reject information collection remains limited. The authors conceptualize a privacy calculus that represents a consumer’s trade–off of the valence and uncertainty of the consequences of the collection, storag...

The implicit promise of a partnership in a loyalty program (LP) is that the partners will gain new customers and the LP will reinforce the loyalty to focal partners. Although customers may be encouraged to cross-purchase from partners (which may create positive synergies), they can also switch among partners without forfeiting rewards (which may le...

Digital transformation and resultant business model innovation have fundamentally altered consumers’ expectations and behaviors, putting immense pressure on traditional firms, and disrupting numerous markets. Drawing on extant literature, we identify three stages of digital transformation: digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. W...

This paper examines the influence of a permanent discount strategy on customer purchase behavior, i.e., purchase incidence in each week, purchase quantity (in units), and total order spending (in CNY). Permanent discounts are defined as discounts continuously provided by retailers. We identify two types of permanent discounts, namely, product-speci...

Hard discounters, such as Aldi and Lidl, have become more important in the last decade. Recent research suggests that the presence of a hard discounter (HD) decreases customers' share of wallet. In this study, we aim to understand why this occurs, by considering how HD presence affects store attributes and store satisfaction. In particular, we inve...

Although webrooming has become common practice in omnichannel consumer behavior, only a few empirical studies have managed to shed light on the phenomenon. With this research work, we aim to investigate important antecedents of webrooming. We base our conceptual framework on anticipated utility theory and expect that customers’ anticipated utility...

Despite the rise of digital, direct mailing as a marketing communication tool remains relevant and widely applied in practice. Nevertheless, research into the effectiveness of direct mailing in the online environment is scant. Key questions that remain entail how direct mailing affect different online and offline consumer activity metrics throughou...

In this research, we focus on the presumed negative effect of a sustainability claim on product quality. We propose that a brands’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) can reduce this negative effect. We conduct an experiment to test our hypotheses for a newly introduced detergent brand with an ecolabel vs. without one for high and low brand CSR l...

In light of the booming digital transformation of firms, we study how industry digital fashion in a competitive environment shapes the development of firm digital skills and their subsequent impacts on firm financial performance. We take an emerging divergence lens in recent literature and argue that firms deviate from their industry digital fashio...

The proliferation of new touchpoints empowers today’s customers to design their own journey from search to purchase. To address this new complexity, we segment customers by their use of specific touchpoints in the customer journey, investigate the association of several covariates with segment membership, consider the rise of mobile devices as pote...

Strong digital developments are changing markets, and firms may adopt a digital business model to deal with these developments. This special issue focuses on such digital business models. In this editorial, we discuss the relevance of digital business models, propose a conceptual framework, and discuss how digital business models affect firms, firm...

To reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, public policy makers often try to stimulate the use of public transport, as it is a more sustainable alternative to traveling by car. This study therefore investigates the impact of firm-initiated marketing actions and traveler satisfaction on monthly cumulative traveled distance of a Western European...

A key question for retailers who already offer a mobile website is, whether they should add an app as an additional purchase channel. We address this issue by exploring whether consumers' app adoption stimulates additional purchases and how this change in purchase behavior differs across customers with different levels of spending share for differe...

Managerial interest in facilitating online communities is thriving. We provide an overview of the current literature on community engagement from which we conclude that community engagement is investigated in various settings (in B2B and B2C environments), with various purposes (e.g., product support, brand communities), and shows somewhat mixed ou...

The increased penetration of mobile devices has a significant impact on customers’ online shopping behavior, with customers frequently switching between mobile and fixed devices on the path to purchase. By accounting for the attributes of the devices and the perceived risks related to each product-category, we develop hypotheses regarding the relat...

In the current age of information and big data, consumer informational privacy has become an important issue in marketing. Besides being worried about the growing collection, storage, and use of personal information, consumers are anxious about a lack of transparency or control over their personal data. Despite these growing concerns, understanding...

Note:the following full text is the accepted manuscript. For the published version, please see http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1700000059 This article presents an overview of and draws conclusions from extant studies related to multichannel retailing. Academic interest in this topic has increased dramatically, with a large number of new articles being p...

Although many studies report positive effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on customer attitudes, recent literature shows that the effectiveness of CSR initiatives critically varies among consumers, brands, and companies. Using 1375 customer responses about 93 brands in 18 industries, we examine how perceived CSR relates to customer att...

Customer equity drivers (CEDs) include value, brand, and relationship equity, which have a strong link with loyalty intentions. This study aims to examine the incremental effects of positive and negative emotions on loyalty intentions and to determine whether these emotions moderate the positive link between CEDs and loyalty intentions. We use cust...

Today's consumers are immersed in a vast and complex array of networks. Each network features an interconnected mesh of people and firms, and now, with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), also objects. Technology (particularly mobile devices) enables such connections, and facilitates many kinds of interactions in these networks—from transacti...

Consumers may weigh store attributes differently depending on the type of shopping trip. For example, fill-in shoppers likely value convenience, due to the ad-hoc nature and urgency of such trips. However, no study has yet explored the effects of shopping trip types on satisfaction formation. This study investigates how three types of shopping trip...

Little is known about the influence of motivators that drive consumers to grant permission to be contacted via personalized communication. In this study, a framework is developed to investigate the effect of select drivers of consumers granting permission to receive personalized messages. The authors distinguish between drivers related to benefit a...

To foster customer relationships, firms have implemented so-called loyalty programs (LPs). These programs provide monetary benefits (e.g. through direct discounts or rewards) and/or more soft benefits by focusing on creating commitment to the firm among customers through excellent service or giving special treatment to customers. In this chapter, w...

In today’s connected world, customer engagement behaviors are very important. Many companies launch initiatives to stimulate customer engagement. However, despite evidence that customer engagement behavior also matters to shareholders, academic research on the firm value consequences of customer engagement campaigns is limited. This study is the fi...

This paper examines the factors that influence competitive showrooming, whereby consumers visit an offline retail store to gather information but make their purchase online at a competing retailer. We survey 556 respondents to study how the benefits and costs of showrooming influence the consumer's decision to showroom. Not surprisingly, we find th...

Today’s consumers are immersed in a vast and complex array of networks. Each network features an interconnected mesh of people and firms, and now, with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), also objects. Technology (particularly mobile devices) enables such connections, and facilitates many kinds of interactions in these networks — from transac...

Using actual purchase data of food products with different labels, we examine Dutch consumers' purchases of organic, fair-trade, and health labels. Empirically, consumers' purchase behavior of labeled products can be categorized into two dimensions: a health-related and a sustainable dimension comprising the purchase of organic and fair-trade produ...

Firms make significant marketing investments in online, mobile and offline media and channels such as search engines, social media, e-mail, display advertising, print, TV, etc., to draw in customers to their websites, mobile apps, and stores to effect conversions and spur sales. As customers go through a series of touch points across media, channel...

Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms. Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require firms to integrate multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating an...

Health organizations stimulate the development of low-fat variants to fight the obesity epidemic. We examine the effectiveness of this policy by studying the short- and long-term consequences of the first low-fat purchase on subsequent purchased volume and calories. Using a structural break analysis, we show that purchases increase in the short run...

For customer-centric firms, churn prediction plays a central role in churn management programs. Methodological advances have emphasized the use of customer panel data to model the dynamic evolution of a customer base to improve churn predictions. However, pressure from policy makers and the public geared to reducing the storage of customer data has...

Customer equity drivers (CEDs)—value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity—positively affect loyalty intentions, but this effect varies across industries and firms. We empirically examine potential industry and firm characteristics that explain why the CEDs–loyalty link varies across services industries and firms in the Netherlands. The res...

Our newly digital world is generating an almost unimaginable amount of data about all of us. Such a vast amount of data is useless without plans and strategies that are designed to cope with its size and complexity, and which enable organisations to leverage the information to create value. This book is a refreshingly practical, yet theoretically s...

Omni-channel marketing refers to the synergetic management of the available channels and customer touchpoints to enhance the customer experience and improve performance. It has become a cornerstone of marketing strategy but putting it into practice is still one of the major challenges that firms face today. In this study, we aim to understand how f...

For their online shops, multichannel retailers must decide whether to adopt a prototypical design (with channel-specific attributes) or a homogenous design (with cues corresponding to their physical stores). While most retailers use a prototypical design, we propose that the effectiveness of a web design depends on customers’ cognitive shopping ori...

As promotions have become more important for retailers, the potential detrimental effect of promotional out-of-stocks (POOS) has likely also increased. Considering purchasing promotions differs substantially from regular purchases we contribute to current knowledge regarding out-of-stocks (e.g. Campo et al., 2000; Sloot et al., 2005). We develop a...

As promotions have become more important for retailers, the potential detrimental effect of promotional out-of-stocks (POOS) has likely also increased. Considering purchasing promotions differs substantially from regular purchases we contribute to current knowledge regarding out-of-stocks (e.g. Campo et al., 2000; Sloot et al., 2005). We develop a...

In this paper, we assess two alternative indicators of opinion leadership, self-reported opinion leadership and degree centrality, on the same dataset. We also investigate the interaction effect of these two indicators and the social network environment on opinion leadership. We use social network and survey data from the mobile telecom industry to...

The world of retailing has changed dramatically in the past decade. The advent of the online channel and new additional digital channels such as mobile channels and social media have changed retail business models, the execution of the retail mix, and shopper behavior. Whereas multi-channel was in vogue in the last decade in retailing, we now obser...

For retailer managers, it is crucial to understand the relationships between customers’ store attribute evaluations, satisfaction, and share of wallet as well as how these relationships change over time depending on the business cycle. This study investigates this complex relationship using an extensive dataset for all grocery chains in the Netherl...

Using a cost–benefit approach, this study is the first to jointly investigate supply-side factors and consumer characteristics that drive or hinder organic purchases. With scanner data that track actual purchase behavior in 28 product categories, the authors find that organic products are less popular in vice categories and categories with high pro...

This study systematically compares different customer feedback metrics (CFMs)—namely customer satisfaction, the Net Promoter Score, and the Customer Effort Score—to test their ability to predict retention across a wide range of industries. We classify the CFMs according to a time focus (past, present, or future) and whether the full scale of the CF...

Service providers sometimes face mass service failures. These problems occur across service industries, ranging from severe Internet outages to major delays for airlines or trains. The literature has not yet addressed the following key question: How do service crises affect perceived service quality (PSQ) over time? To answer this question, the aut...

In this chapter, our overall contribution is to demonstrate and discuss the important role of customer acquisition in customer equity management. Our main claim is that customer equity management should govern acquisition strategies as they predetermine later outcomes to a substantial degree. These underlying dynamics in the customer portfolio are...

In marketing literature, several Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) models can be found. Most include retention, revenues and direct marketing costs. In this study, we contribute to the existing literature on CLV by including service costs as a value detractors and credit risk as a revenue risk. We show that, in our study context, customer value should...

We propose a framework for the joint study of the consumer’s decision of where to buy and what to buy. The framework is rooted in utility theory where the utility is for a particular channel/brand combination. The framework contains firm actions, the consumer search process, the choice process, and consumer learning. We develop research questions w...

This study examines the effect of attractively priced acquisition campaigns on retention intention, and subsequently CLV, of existing customers. The main finding is that customers who are aware of the acquisition campaigns both have a significantly higher intention to stay and do actually stay longer than do customers who are unaware of these campa...

Voor de evaluatie van diensten wordt door veel bedrijven gebruik gemaakt van zogenaamde customer feedback metrics (CFMs). Deze maatstaven, zoals klanttevredenheid en de Net Promoter Score (NPS), geven een indicatie hoe het klantenbestand over het bedrijf denkt, wat een goede indicator kan zijn voor (toekomstig) klantgedrag en voor bedrijfsprestatie...

The redemption of loyalty program (LP) rewards has an important impact on LP members’ behavior, particularly on purchase behavior before and after redeeming a reward. However, little is known about the interplay between members’ purchase and redemption behavior when members are not pressured with points expiration and they choose for themselves whe...

Many firms capitalize on their customers' social networks to improve the success rate of their new products. In this article, the authors analyze the dynamic effects of social influence and direct marketing on the adoption of a new high-technology product. Social influence is likely to play a role because the decision to adopt a high-involvement pr...

Internet usage continues to explode across the world with digital becoming an increasingly important source of competitive advantage in both B2C and B2B marketing. A great deal of attention has been focused on the tremendous opportunities digital marketing presents, with little attention on the real challenges companies are facing going digital. In...

How can firms retain customers during recessions? To answer this question, we investigate the moderating role of consumer confidence (CC) on the effects of three types of crucial customer loyalty strategies. These strategies are value equity (VE), brand equity (BE), and relationship equity (RE), collectively called customer equity drivers (CEDs). W...

In the past decade, firms have paid increasing attention to customer value management (CVM). Through customer-centric management systems, firms aim to maximize customer value. In this article, we put forth six important lessons that firms can employ for successful CVM, integrating available research knowledge and best practices: (1) use CVM to impr...

This study investigates the impact of eliminating a search channel on purchase incidence, order size, channel choice and, ultimately, sales and profits. We analyze customer panel data from a large retailer over a five-year period. The retailer conducted a randomized field test in which the firm eliminated its catalog for half of the panel. We find...

Many firms stimulate customers to use the E-channel for services, which provokes various consumer responses to such limits on their freedom of choice. In a study on bank customers, we examine the extent of customer reactance in response to various E-channel migration strategies, the potential of incentive programs in mitigating customer reactance,...

This article provides a more integrative approach toward channel choice than previous research by considering all stages of the buying process (search, purchase, and after-sales), and by taking channel attributes, experience, and spillover effects into account when examining consumers’ channel choice intentions. The authors show that such an integr...