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From Browsing to Buying and Beyond: The Needs-Adaptive Shopper Journey Model
Abstract
We propose a theory-based model of the shopper journey, incorporating the rich literature in consumer and marketing research and taking into account the evolving retailing landscape characterized by significant knowledge, lifestyle, technological, and structural changes. With consumer well-being at its core and shopper needs and motivations as the focus, our needs-adaptive shopper journey model complements and contrasts with existing models. In addition, we identify 12 shopper journey archetypes representing the paths that consumers commonly follow—archetypes that illustrate the workings and applications of our model. We discuss the nature of these archetypes, their relationships with one another, and the psychological states that consumers may experience on these shopper journeys. We also present exploratory empirical studies assessing the component states in the archetypes and mapping the archetypes onto dimensions of shopping motivations. Finally, we lay out a research agenda to help increase understanding of shopper behavior in the evolving retailing landscape.
... Perubahan cara konsumen yang dimaksud adalah perubahan dalam berbelanja yang mulai terjadi kecenderungan pergeseran berbelanja di toko fisik (offline) menjadi berbelanja dengan cara meminimalkan interaksi fisik manusia yaitu dengan online shopping. Perubahan ini disebut oleh Lee et al.(2018) sebagai perilaku adaptive shopper karena penyesuaian terhadap kondisi. ...
... Secara khusus, Nguyen et al., (2020) memberikan kontribusi dengan memasukkan variable faktor situasional dalam memotivasi online shopping. Faktor situasional, terdiri dari "semua faktor yang tidak terkait dengan pembuat keputusan sebagai individu (misalnya kepribadian dan karakteristik fisik) atau dengan berbagai alternatif keputusan" (Hand et al., 2009;Ross & Robertson, 2003 Lee et al., (2018). Konsep ini disertai juga dengan penjelasan shopper journey untuk bisa mengungkap "petualangan konsumen" dalam proses sebelum, proses pencarian, sampai output dari petualangannya yang tidak selalu berakhir dengan motif pembelian. ...
... Sehingga, belum ada model yang mengakomodasi berbagai kebutuhan atau tujuan pembeli yang berbeda-beda di seluruh journey. Gambar 1 mengilustrasikan kerangka kerja yang diusulkan oleh (Lee et al., 2018). ...
Tujuan paper adalah untuk memberikan kerangka kerja konseptual penelitian empiris tematis tentang perilaku adaptif konsumen (adaptive shopper) dalam menyesuaikan kebijakan physical distancing dari pemerintah selama masa pandemic covid 19 untuk melakukan belanja online dari rumah. Kerangka kerja koseptual diusulkan dengan mengajukan variabel motivasi berbelanja online yang sudah ada berupa motivasi utilitarian, hedonic dan faktor situasional. Kontribusi paper ini yaitu memasukkan variabel moderasi hubungan antara motivasi berbelanja dengan niat berbelanja online, yaitu tipe shopper journey dari konsumen yang beragam. Dalam model konseptual diungkap ada empat tipe shopper journey yang relevan muncul pada masa physical distancing yaitu classical journey, required journey, entertainment journey, dan oursourced journey.
... The proposed model seeks to provide a complete depiction of the consumer decision journey for mobile device assisted shoppers than is currently available. A related goal is to identify mobile device assisted shopper segments that can be used to describe alternative pathways to purchase (Aw et al., 2021;Lee et al., 2018). ...
... The present study uses a needs-adaptive approach (Lee et al., 2018) to propose a conceptual model that describes the pathway to purchase for mobile device assisted shoppers (see Fig. 1). It does so by (a) identifying differences on consumer decision journey constructs between shoppers who use a mobile device in a store in comparison to those who do not use such a device, and (b) formulating and testing hypotheses that seek to explain the inter-relationships between these constructs. ...
... The conceptual model incorporates both cost-benefit and risk-uncertainty reduction mechanisms (Lee et al., 2018;Shankar and Balasubramanian, 2009) to propose hypotheses by examining potential interactions between shopping goals (i.e., consumer motivations) and in-store mobile device use. The use of a mobile device while shopping in a brick-and-mortar store will influence both the amount and type of in-store search. ...
The present study examines the effect of using a mobile device on search and evaluation by a shopper in a brick-and-mortar store. A conceptual model that proposes interrelationships between shopping goals, the amount and type of in-store mobile device use, and purchase outcomes is developed. Data from a national quota sample of 1034 mobile shoppers is used to test hypotheses derived from the proposed model. The findings provide several new insights into the impact of in-store mobile device use on the consumer decision journey in a brick-and-mortar store. Depending upon the shopping goals of the consumer, the use of a mobile device by shoppers in a brick-and-mortar store can either decrease or increase search, lead to more deferred purchases or in-store-now purchases, and more online or physical store purchases. The study is among the first to model the pathway to purchase for mobile device assisted shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores.
... It is widely accepted that these four phases capture the key aspects of consumers' activities during the process of product purchase, ranging from early theoretical models of consumer behavior (e.g., Howard and Sheth 1969) to current descriptions of consumer decision-making (e.g., Lee et al. 2018). We focus on three theoretically substantiated classes of biases (i.e., nonstandard preferences, nonstandard beliefs, and nonstandard decision-making; DellaVigna 2009) rather than on individual biases and synthesize their effects on consumers during each phase of purchase decision-making. ...
... The process of consumers' purchase decision-making is often presented as four distinct phases, including (1) need recognition, (2) pre-purchase activities, (3) purchase decision, and (4) post-purchase activities (e.g., Yadav et al. 2013). Although we are well aware that customer journeys are affected by an evolving retailing 16 CHAPTER 2. BEHAVIORAL BIASES IN MARKETING landscape (e.g., technological and structural changes; Lee et al. 2018), we believe that the core states of the purchase process remain valid. ...
... During the need recognition phase, the consumer recognizes a problem or need due to an internal signal (e.g., thirst) or an external signal (e.g., advertisement; Yadav et al. 2013;Lee et al. 2018). During this phase, consumers become aware and intrigued by a particular brand, product (category), or some aspect of the shopping environment. ...
Eine zentrale Aufgabe des Marketings ist es, die Präferenzen von Konsumenten zu verstehen und die Heterogenität dieser aufzudecken. Eine Reihe kritischer Entscheidungen, z.B. bei der Neuproduktentwicklung, der Marktsegmentierung und dem Targeting oder der Preisgestaltung, beruhen auf der genauen Einschätzung der Konsumentenpräferenzen. Die Marketingliteratur hat sich bisher auf die Entwicklung von Modellen und Schätzverfahren konzentriert, die es ermöglichen, die Heterogenität von Konsumentenpräferenzen aufzudecken. Konsumenten unterscheiden sich jedoch auch in der Art und Weise, wie sie Kaufentscheidungen treffen und welche verfügbaren Informationen sie nutzen. Das Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es, unser Verständnis für die Unaufmerksamkeit der Konsumenten gegenüber Produkteigenschaften bezüglich Entscheidungen zu verbessern. Es geht darum, 1) die Verbreitung einer solchen Unaufmerksamkeit in verschiedenen Kontexten zu untersuchen, 2) die Methoden, die ein solches Verhalten explizit berücksichtigen, zu untersuchen und zu erweitern, 3) potenzielle Verzerrungen in Parametern zu verstehen und 4) Implikationen für das Management abzuleiten. Die Ergebnisse aus einer umfassenden Reihe von Anwendungen legen nahe, dass Konsumenten in verschiedenen Kontexten (z.B. Produktkategorien) und Settings (z.B. von hoher oder niedriger Komplexität) eine Menge an verfügbaren Informationen bezüglich Produkteigenschaften ignorieren. Zweitens, Entscheidungsmodelle, die ein solches Verhalten explizit berücksichtigen und zusätzlich weitere Daten wie z.B. Eye-Tracking nutzen, zu einem besseren In- und Out-of-Sample-Fit führen. Drittens führt die Missachtung eines solchen Verhaltens zu Verzerrungen, deren Richtung und Größe von der Art des Merkmals (d.h., ob eine bestimmte Richtung der Präferenzen erwartet werden kann) und dem Anteil der Konsumenten, die dieses Merkmal ignorieren, abhängt. Infolgedessen kann es dazu kommen, dass Manager keine optimalen Preis- und Targeting-Entscheidungen treffen.
... Understanding and predicting consumers' purchase journey has been a cornerstone in the field of marketing. Several recent reviews provide comprehensive summaries of the relevant studies (e.g., Lee et al. 2018;Lemon and Verhoef 2016;Hamilton and Price 2019). The efforts to describe the consumer journey date back to the classic AIDA framework (Strong 1925;Howard and Sheth 1969), in which a consumer progresses through awareness, interest, desire, and action phases along the purchase funnel. ...
... For example, McKinsey & Company depicts a consumer's shopping journey with a circular Consumer Decision Journey model (Court et al. 2009), which differs from the unidirectional AIDA model. When proposing a behavioral framework to describe the consumer journey, Lee et al. (2018) highlight its non-linear and adaptive features. ...
... Consumers progress on the purchase journey in order to fulfill their needs. The classic AIDA model depicts the consumer journey as a purchase funnel (Strong 1925;Howard and Sheth 1969), where consumers' latent purchase propensities can be influenced by their goals or situational factors in the shopping environment (Lee et al. 2018;Hamilton and Price 2019). Our model characterizes several key components of the consumer journey, including the consumer's channel choice, the topic composition of their search queries, and the purchase decision, at the individual consumer level. ...
In gathering information for an intended purchase decision, consumers submit search phrases to online search engines. These search phrases directly express the consumers’ needs in their own words and thus provide valuable information to marketing managers. Interpreting consumers’ search phrases renders a better understanding of consumers’ purchase intentions, which is critical for marketing success. In this paper, we develop an integrated model to connect the latent topics embedded in consumers’ search phrases to their website visits and purchase decisions. Using a unique dataset containing more than 8,000 search phrases submitted by consumers, our model identifies latent topics underlying the searches that led consumers to the firm’s website. Compared to a model lacking any textual information from consumers’ search phrases, a model using textual data in a heuristic approach, and a model based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation, our model provides a better evaluation of a consumer’s position on the path to purchase and achieves much better predictive accuracy, which could in turn substantially increase the firm’s revenue. We also extend our discussion to aggregators and affiliated websites and segments of consumers who are exposed to the firm’s outbound ads. Marketing managers can use our method to extract structured information from consumers’ search phrases to facilitate their inference of consumers’ latent purchase states and improve marketing efficiency.
... Over time, depictions of the customer journey, commonly referred to as customer journey maps, have become more complex and specialized, with additional stages and extensions added both before and after the purchase. Recent contributions include conceptualizing a nonlinear customer journey (Court et al. 2009), emphasizing the various stakeholders who "own" different touchpoints along the journey (Lemon and Verhoef 2016), and identifying a set of journey archetypes that acknowledge the diverse cognitive and behavioral states that motivate purchases (Lee et al. 2018). Others have argued that more than constituting simply a path to purchase, customer journeys are depictions of the entire customer experience (Puccinelli et al. 2009) or even paths to achieving life goals (Hamilton and Price 2019). ...
... A more recent depiction, the "needs-adaptive" shopper journey model (Lee et al. 2018), de-emphasizes the multistage journey model in favor of a more fluid set of "states" consumers may experience. By using differences in the movement among these states, the authors identify journey archetypes of common purchase situations. ...
... However, it also allows for a more specific approach for incorporating social influences by identifying several archetypes that are inherently social: the "joint journey," the "social network journey," and the "outsourced journey." Lee et al. (2018) also acknowledge that social influences can play a role even in archetypes not explicitly centered on social influence (e.g., "retail therapy journey" and "learning journey" both implicitly incorporate social influences). This customer-journey-as-archetype model provides a novel way of characterizing customer experiences and produces new insights. ...
When customers journey from a need to a purchase decision and beyond, they rarely do so alone. This article introduces the social customer journey, which extends prior perspectives on the path to purchase by explicitly integrating the important role that social others play throughout the journey. The authors highlight the importance of “traveling companions,” who interact with the decision maker through one or more phases of the journey, and they argue that the social distance between the companion(s) and the decision maker is an important factor in how social influence affects that journey. They also consider customer journeys made by decision-making units consisting of multiple individuals and increasingly including artificial intelligence agents that can serve as surrogates for social others. The social customer journey concept integrates prior findings on social influences and customer journeys and highlights opportunities for new research within and across the various stages. Finally, the authors discuss several actionable marketing implications relevant to organizations’ engagement in the social customer journey, including managing influencers, shaping social interactions, and deploying technologies.
... It is widely accepted that these four phases capture the key aspects of consumers' activities during the process of product purchase, ranging from early theoretical models of consumer behavior (e.g., Howard and Sheth 1969) to current descriptions of consumer decision making (e.g., Lee et al. 2018). We focus on three theoretically substantiated classes of biases (i.e., nonstandard preferences, nonstandard beliefs, and nonstandard decision making; DellaVigna 2009) rather than on individual biases and synthesize their effects on consumers during each phase of purchase decision making. ...
... The process of consumers' purchase decision making is often presented as four distinct phases, including (1) need recognition, (2) pre-purchase activities, (3) purchase decision, and (4) post-purchase activities (e.g., Yadav et al. 2013). Although we are well aware that customer journeys are affected by an evolving retailing landscape (e.g., technological and structural changes; Lee et al. 2018), we believe that the core states of the purchase process remain valid. ...
... Need recognition During the need recognition phase, the consumer recognizes a problem or need due to an internal signal (e.g., thirst) or an external signal (e.g., advertisement ;Yadav et al. 2013;Lee et al. 2018). During this phase, consumers become aware and intrigued by a particular brand, product (category), or some aspect of the shopping environment. ...
Psychology and economics (together known as behavioral economics) are two prominent disciplines underlying many theories in marketing. The extensive marketing literature documents consumers’ nonrational behavior even though behavioral biases might not always be consistently termed or formally described. In this review, we identify and synthesize empirical research on behavioral biases in marketing. We document the key findings according to three classes of deviations (i.e., nonstandard preferences, nonstandard beliefs, and nonstandard decision making) and the four phases of consumer purchase decision making (i.e., need recognition, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase). Our organizing framework allows us to (1) synthesize instructive marketing papers in a concise and meaningful manner and (2) identify connections and differences within and across categories in both dimensions. In our review, we discuss specific implications for management and avenues for future research.
... Durch die explizite Fokussierung auf das Kauf verhalten statt dem Konsum, die bereits im Titel des Werks offenkundig wird (vgl. auchHoward und Sheth 1969, S. 3), deutete sich bereits seine Relevanz für BtoB und CtoCBeziehungen als weitere Bereiche des Marketings an (Bettman 2020).Darüber hinaus finden sich die Phasen der Kaufentscheidung, wie sie das Mo dell postuliert, in ähnlicher Form in vielen, neueren CustomerJourneyModellen wieder(Lee et al. 2018; vgl. Bettman 2020). ...
Dallas Smythe bearbeitet polit-ökonomisch eine Reihe von Fragen, die dann in der späteren Rezeptionsgeschichte des Textes v. a. in der sog. Blindspot-Debatte und in der Digital Labour-Debatte kontroverse Antworten provoziert haben: Warum werden aus ökonomischer Sicht überhaupt massenmediale Inhalte, wie Information und Unterhaltung produziert? Was genau kaufen die Werbetreibenden mit ihren Werbeausgaben? Wie stellen die Werbetreibenden sicher, auch das zu erhalten, wofür sie bezahlen? Welche Rolle spielt das Publikum für die wirtschaftliche Beziehung zwischen Massenmedien und werbetreibender Industrie? Wer produziert die Dienstleistung bzw. Ware, die die Werbetreibenden kaufen? Wie lässt sich die Werbeindustrie im (Monopol-)Kapitalismus im Rahmen einer marxistischen (Arbeits-)Werttheorie verstehen? Haben sowohl kritische als auch orthodoxe wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Ansätze die ökonomische Rolle werbefinanzierter Medien bisher missinterpretiert? Mit der Einführung des Begriffs der audience commodity (Publikumsware) bestimmt der Text die Rolle des Publikums für die kapitalistische Ökonomie als eine produktive, dessen Aktivität unter monopol- oder oligopolartigen Marktbedingungen fortlaufend gesichert werden muss, um sie ausbeuten zu können.
... Such mood-alleviating shopping denotes self-gifting behavior (Luomala, 1998). People can feel intrinsic enjoyment and hedonic gratification even when they do not actually buy anything and only perform window shopping (Lee et al., 2018). Meanwhile, some studies have stated that the consumption of luxuries is effective in alleviating negative feelings and eliciting better moods (Gould, 1991;Lazarus, 1991;Luce, 1998;Tsai, 2005). ...
People tend to alleviate their negative emotions by shopping. Considering the change of shopping behavior during COVID-19 outbreak, negative emotions are the key contributors to this change. In this light, this study aims to investigate how negative emotions caused by COVID-19 affect shopping behaviors. This study classified consumer groups based on their perceived negative emotions (i.e., anxiety, fear, depression, anger, and boredom). By clustering analysis, four groups (i.e., group of anxiety, depression, anger, and indifference) were derived. Then, this study examined how each of the emotional groups differently affect the shopping-related motivations (i.e., mood alleviation, shopping enjoyment, socialization seeking, and self-control seeking) and shopping behaviors (i.e., shopping for high-priced goods and buying of bulk goods). Results revealed all emotional groups affect socialization seeking and influence high-priced shopping intentions. However, depression and indifference are positively associated with socialization seeking and influence bulk shopping intentions. In addition, other emotions except for anxiety affect mood alleviation and influence high-priced shopping intentions. Finally, anger is associated with self-control seeking and affects bulk shopping intentions. This study enables practitioners and researchers to better understand how people control negative emotions by shopping in pandemic situations such as the current COVID-19 crisis.
... Customer experience is a temporally and spatially dynamic concept, meaning that it can be observed as it develops and changes over the duration of a customer journey across multiple touchpoints (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016;Rawson et al., 2013). Parting ways with the traditional linear purchase funnel view, recent research has emphasized the uniqueness of each customer journey (Grewal & Roggeveen, 2020;Lee et al., 2018). While touchpoints that encompass stimuli, interfaces, and encounters (Barann et al., 2020) are undoubtedly important pockets of experience creation, we argue that focusing on journeys in omnichannel retailing can better capture the determinants of experience formation lying in the in-between spaces formed by consistencies and variations between different touchpoints. ...
Omnichannel literature largely assumes that retailers should integrate touchpoints across channels to promote seamless experiences. This paper challenges this assumption by exploring how perceived journey integration affects customer experience in omnichannel retailing. A qualitative study reveals that two dimensions of journey integration—consistency and connectivity—interact to form four patterns of omnichannel journeys, each prompting distinct experiences. When looking at this phenomenon through the customer’s perspective, we find that there are cases in which low consistency or connectivity can trigger positive experiences, contradicting extant literature. We then formulate research propositions that challenge the “integration imperative” in the omnichannel literature and provide managerial implications for retail firms that want to improve their customers’ experiences.
... In der Konsumentenverhaltensforschung besteht eine lange Tradition von Ansätzen, die versuchen die Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Kaufentscheidungsprozesse konzeptuell zu ordnen und hiermit verbundene Konsumentenhandlungen und deren Einflussgrößen als Handlungsgrundlage für das Marketing zu verstehen (Court, 2009;Howard & Sheth, 1969;Lee et al., 2018;Plottek & Herold, 2018;Strong, 1925 (Kotler et al., 2016;Stankevich, 2017). ...
Das Buch beschäftigt sich mit der gesellschaftlich relevanten Frage, wie Konsumenten stärker zu einem nachhaltigeren Konsumverhalten motiviert werden können. Die fokussierte Analyse von Einflussfaktoren der Gewissensaktivierung zeigt dabei auf, unter welchen Bedingungen sich diese moralisch stärker bzw. weniger stark bewegt fühlen, ihre Kaufentscheidungen an sozial-ökologischen Kriterien auszurichten. Die Erkenntnisse liefern Handlungsempfehlungen für Anbieter nachhaltiger Produkte und verbraucherpolitische Akteure.
Der Autor
Sven Kilian ist am Fachgebiet Marketing der Universität Kassel als Postdoktorand angestellt und betreut dort Forschungsprojekte im Bereich des nachhaltigen Konsumverhaltens.
... The proposed approach can be used to identify customers with exploratory search motives who have a less concrete purchase goal. Identifying browsing offers opportunities for marketers to persuade consumers to buy and not just browse (Lee et al. 2018), for example, by offering special coupons or showing advertisements. The point when a consumer decision support system actively approaches the user might be dependent on the search motive. ...
How can we tailor assistance systems, such as recommender systems or decision support systems, to consumers’ individual shopping motives? How can companies unobtrusively identify shopping motives without explicit user input? We demonstrate that eye movement data allow building reliable prediction models for identifying goal-directed and exploratory shopping motives. Our approach is validated in a real supermarket and in an immersive virtual reality supermarket. Several managerial implications of using gaze-based classification of information search behavior are discussed: First, the advent of virtual shopping environments makes using our approach straightforward as eye movement data are readily available in next-generation virtual reality devices. Virtual environments can be adapted to individual needs once shopping motives are identified and can be used to generate more emotionally engaging customer experiences. Second, identifying exploratory behavior offers opportunities for marketers to adapt marketing communication and interaction processes. Personalizing the shopping experience and profiling customers’ needs based on eye movement data promises to further increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction. Third, eye movement-based recommender systems do not need to interrupt consumers and thus do not take away attention from the purchase process. Finally, our paper outlines the technological basis of our approach and discusses the practical relevance of individual predictors.
... Following prior academic literature and business press articles on the customer journey (Hamilton et al. 2020;Lemon and Verhoef 2016;Lee et al. 2018), we consider the customer journey a three-stage process: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. 1 The pre-purchase stage includes customer interactions in the navigation path before purchase. In this first stage, customers identify needs, discover a product/brand, search for information, and build a consideration set while evaluating choice alternatives. ...
Digital technologies and digital media are changing the environments in which firms interact with customers. However, the evolution of digital organizational forms, customer technology use, and the nature of customer journeys differ significantly across global markets. Drawing on observations of customer journeys across different international markets, the authors propose a framework to explain the observed differences in terms of the cross-cultural and socioeconomic factors that influence customer journeys. The authors put forth several propositions built on logical extensions of the extant research findings and identify areas for future academic research. In addition, they outline the managerial implications arising from the application of the framework for multinational firms seeking to market their products and services across global markets.
... (Neil Gershenfeld, MIT) Marketing scholarship in general, and retailing research in particular, operates under the assumption that products are made by firms, sold by retailers, and bought by consumers. For example, many topics of current interest to retailing scholars, including omnichannel retailing (Cao & Li, 2018), the retail experience (Jahn, Nierobisch, Toporowski, & Dannewald, 2018), and shopper marketing ( Lee et al., 2018), largely regard retailers as places (physical or virtual) where people acquire objects made by manufacturers. In addition to informing our scholarly worldview, this assumption is also congruent with our lived experience, as most of the things we use on a daily basis are obtained in this manner. ...
Retailing thought and practice is premised on the assumption that consumers visit retailers to search for and acquire objects produced by manufacturers. In essence, we assume that the acts of consuming and producing are conducted by separate entities. This unspoken yet familiar premise shapes the questions retail scholars ask and the way retail practitioners think about their industry. Although this assumption accurately depicted retailing since the Industrial Revolution, its relevance is being challenged by a growing set of individuals who are equipped with new digital tools to engage in self-manufacturing. In this chapter, we examine self-manufacturing with a particular focus on the recent rise of desktop 3D printing. After discussing this new technology and reviewing the literature, we offer a conceptual classification of four distinct types of 3D printed objects and use this classification to inform a content analysis of over 400 of these objects. Based on this review and analysis, we discuss the implications of self-manufacturing for retailing thought and practice.
Das in The Theory of Buyer Behavior von Howard und Sheth entwickelte Modell galt lange Zeit als das umfassendste Modell zur Erklärung individuellen Kaufverhaltens, welches gleichzeitig praktische Implikationen für das Management bot, und fand so Eingang in die Grundlagenliteratur der Marketing- und Werbewirkungsforschung. Durch die Implementierung zentraler Wahrnehmungs- und Lernkonstrukte im Prozess der Kaufentscheidung gilt das Totalmodell als wegweisend in der differenzierten Berücksichtigung von kognitions- und lerntheoretischen Grundlagen und Kontextbedingungen in der Erforschung des Konsumverhaltens. Eine ganzheitliche empirische Prüfung des Modells birgt jedoch seit jeher methodische Herausforderungen.
Impact of quality of big data marketing analytics (BDMA) was analyzed, with special attention to the BDMA dimensions of technology and information quality, and the level of deployment on perceived market and financial performance. The sample was collected with Canadian and U.S. marketing respondents with experience in big data (BD) deployment (N=236). The model analysis was done with PLS-SEM. The study highlights how technology and information quality are related to the market and financial performance with high predictive validity and strength. Also, the level of deployment had a significant impact on both the technology and information quality in BDMA. The study provides an understanding of how the level of deployment impacts BDMA technology and information quality dimensions; and how they individually contribute to the enhancement of a firm's market and financial performance from the perspective of marketing personnel with experience in deployment of BDMA. It is also evident that the more advanced the firm is in the deployment of BD, the higher the technology and information quality.
Customer journey models consider information search behavior only at the pre-purchase stage, yet consumers search for information after purchasing. This paper updates customer journey models by integrating two different streams of research—customer journey and post-decision information search (PDIS)—and examining information search as a valuable consumer response and managerial element of the journey. Findings from a multimethod approach, in-depth interviews and a longitudinal survey, reveal that consumers can engage in PDIS in the pre- and post-consumption phases for different reasons such as to maximize the utility of a purchase, reduce choice uncertainty or regret, and/or satisfy curiosity about a purchase and pre-purchase information search behavior. The findings also indicate that consumers prefer customer-initiated touchpoints for PDIS behavior. The importance of PDIS is reinforced by its positive relationships with customer engagement, word-of-mouth and repurchase intentions. This article provides important managerial insights for dealing with PDIS in the customer journey.
Consumers often respond to a self‐discrepancy in a certain domain by engaging in consumption that may restore their perceived standing in that domain. However, less is known about when and why consumers seek products that affirm the self in domains that are important to their self‐worth, yet unrelated to the discrepancy (known as fluid compensation). We address this gap by identifying an important factor that influences fluid compensation: thinking style. Across five studies and three follow‐up studies, we find that people with a temporarily activated or dispositional holistic thinking style are more likely to engage in fluid compensation than people with an analytic thinking style. This phenomenon occurs because, by perceiving parts as more functionally related to a larger whole, holistic (vs. analytic) thinkers are more likely to view fluid compensation as instrumental to enhancing global self‐worth. Holistic (vs. analytic) thinkers’ greater propensity to engage in fluid compensation, in turn, better enables them to restore their global self‐worth. These findings contribute to the literature on compensatory consumption, thinking style, and consumer well‐being.
Consistent with market orientation, marketing activities based on sentiment analysis involve gathering market intelligence, disseminating it firmwide, and responding to customer needs. While it has been applied in various marketing settings, antecedents of consumer sentiments that are rooted in social media platform effects need further examination. Using consumers’ social media journey as conceptual support, the current research investigates how consumer sentiments on social media are shaped by hashtag position, the bandwagon effect, and user anonymity and authority. The conceptual framework presented proposes that individual user characteristics of anonymity and authority influence platform effects including hashtag position and positive and negative bandwagon effects which impact expressed sentiments. The hypotheses are tested by analyzing over half a million tweets for 127 movies using the machine learning methodology of Bayesian Network analysis. Managerial implications for regulating platform effects to achieve the intended sentiment outcome, and limitations and avenues for future research are offered.
Due to its immense popularity amongst marketing practitioners, online personalized advertising is increasingly becoming the subject of academic research. Although advertisers need to collect a large amount of customer information to develop customized online adverts, the effect of how this information is collected on advert effectiveness has been surprisingly understudied. Equally overlooked is the interplay between consumer’s emotions and the process of consumer data collection. Two studies were conducted with the aim of closing these important gaps in the literature. Our findings revealed that overt user data collection techniques produced more favourable cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral responses than covert techniques. Moreover, consistent with the self-validation hypothesis, our data revealed that the effects of these data collection techniques can be enhanced (e.g., via happiness and pride), attenuated (e.g., via sadness), or even eliminated (e.g., via guilt), depending on the emotion experienced by the consumer while viewing an advert.
In recent years, delivering a superior seamless experience (SE) for customers has become one of the most crucial aspects of omnichannel marketing for omnichannel retailers. However, research lacks a common understanding of what the SE is and how customers evaluate the SE throughout their omnichannel shopping journeys, and the effects of the SE on important customer behaviors remain unexplored. Drawing on omnichannel customer experience research, following the scale development process, this research conceptualize and develop a scale to measure the SE construct. Building on the customer experience quality framework, this research further examines the effects of customers’ prior SE on repurchase intention, word of mouth (WOM), and customer influence behavior in the omnichannel shopping context. The SE scale is developed and validated by performing 15 semi-structured interviews, 62 open-ended questionnaires, and three online surveys with 884 useable respondents in total. The effects of SE are then validated via partial least squares modeling with 307 useable respondents. The findings confirm that the SE construct is a formative second-order construct composed of six reflective first-order dimensions. Our empirical findings indicate that the overall SE has a direct and significant impact on the foregoing three customer behaviors. Managers can use the SE scale as an effective omnichannel approach to design a seamless shopping journey and maintain long-term relationships with customers.
This study explores the influence of Family Life Cycle (FLC) stages on the perceived value-customer loyalty relationship in e-shopping. A customized Indian FLC classification system comprising ten FLC stages was used in this study. Perceived value was measured as Utilitarian Value (UV) and Hedonic Value (HV), which acted as second-order constructs formed by utilitarian and hedonic benefits. Customer loyalty was measured as Re-Purchase Intention (RPI), positive Word of Mouth (WOM) and Willingness To Pay More (WTPM). Based on the split into FLC stages, 827 married women e-shoppers in metropolitan cities participated in the study. Value-loyalty and benefits-loyalty relationships were measured using PLS-SEM and differences in group behaviour were observed using PLS-MGA. Results showed that UV had a significant dominant effect on all value dimensions, while HV had a significant effect on only the dimension, WOM. Moreover, the values/benefits influencing dimensions of loyalty differed as women transcended from one FLC stage to the next. In effect, this study showed strong empirical evidence that FLC stages play a significant role in e-shopping Value-Loyalty and Benefit-Loyalty relationship.
Consumers around the world use retail therapy to alleviate negative emotions. In response, marketers have incorporated cute elements into product design, capitalizing on the demand for products that provide healing effects. Grounded on attention restoration theory, this study explores how baby and whimsical cuteness generate feelings of healing. It also clarifies the moderating effect of product type and examines whether feelings of healing affect consumer subjective well-being, product attitudes, and purchase intentions. The results indicate that products with cute elements generate stronger feelings of healing. Baby cuteness is relatively more effective than whimsical cuteness. Cuteness arouses feelings of healing through the mechanisms of fascination and extent. Incorporating cute elements with utilitarian (vs. hedonic) products enhances these healing effects. Feelings of healing mediate the cuteness effect on well-being and attitudinal responses. These findings are valuable to marketing theory and practice and consumer well-being.
Background
Female-initiated prevention products could reduce HIV infection rates in contexts with pronounced gender inequality like South Africa, but uptake and adherence remain low when available. Insights into the behavior of target consumers are needed to effectively promote these products; however, perceptions of stigma may discourage honest reporting.
Focus of the Article
To address this need, we examined differences among the consumer journeys of six segments of South African adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), who vary on sexual health beliefs, sexual experience, and self-enhancement, when buying hygiene products.
Research Question
We hypothesized that segments would differ in what motivated their purchases and in engagement with different touchpoints, reflecting a need for targeted outreach strategies.
Methods
1,500 low-income, Black South African AGYW (14–25 years of age) were surveyed face-to-face in their homes about their consumer journeys when purchasing deodorant and sanitary products, with the aim of extending the insights obtained to HIV prevention.
Results
We found notable similarities across segments but also several important differences underscoring the potential for tailored marketing of HIV prevention products. Among some of the segments, differences were found in prepurchase mindsets and touchpoints, retail and brand drivers, and postpurchase feelings.
Recommendations for Research or Practice
These findings highlight the need for tailored outreach among AGYW and may inform the design of effective, personalized marketing strategies that enhance the appeal of HIV prevention products.
Limitations
To circumvent potential stigma associated with HIV, survey questions were anchored on personal hygiene products. While this may encourage greater honesty, findings may not fully generalize to HIV prevention products.
Retailing is undergoing a remarkable transformation brought by recent advances in technology. In this paper, we provide a deep discussion of and look ahead on how technology is changing retail, starting with a classification of technologies that impact retailing, in particular, in the COVID-19 and beyond world. We discuss different theoretical frameworks or lenses to better understand the role of technology in retailing. We identify and elaborate on the drivers and outcomes of technology adoption by shoppers, retailers, employees, and suppliers. We speculate on future retail scenarios and outline future research avenues on technology and retailing. We close by concluding that technology is not only reshaping retailing, but also allowing retailing to pivot in the face of new and unforeseen circumstances.
In gathering information for an intended purchase decision, consumers submit search phrases to online search engines. These search phrases directly express the consumers’ needs in their own words and thus provide valuable information to marketing managers. Interpreting consumers’ search phrases renders a better understanding of their purchase intentions, which is critical for marketing success. In this article, the authors develop an integrated model to connect the latent topics embedded in consumers’ search phrases to their website visits and purchase decisions. Using a unique data set containing more than 8,000 search phrases submitted by consumers, the model identifies latent topics underlying the searches that led consumers to the firm’s website. Compared with a model lacking any textual information from consumers’ search phrases, a model using textual data in a heuristic approach, and a model based on the latent Dirichlet allocation, the proposed model provides a better evaluation of a consumer’s position on the path to purchase and achieves much better predictive accuracy, which could in turn substantially increase the firm’s revenue. The authors also extend the discussion to aggregators, affiliated websites, and segments of consumers who are exposed to the firm’s outbound ads. Marketing managers can use this method to extract structured information from consumers’ search phrases to facilitate their inference of consumers’ latent purchase states and thereby improve marketing efficiency.
Changes in the way customers shop accompanied by an explosion of customer touchpoints and fast-changing competitive and technological dynamics, have led to an increased emphasis on agile marketing. The objective of this paper is to conceptualize and investigate the emerging practice of marketing agility. Toward this end, the authors synthesize the literature from marketing and allied disciplines and insights from in-depth interviews with 22 senior managers. Marketing agility is defined as the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market. It is conceptualized as occurring across different levels in organizations and shown to be distinctive from related concepts in marketing and allied fields. The authors highlight the firm challenges in executing marketing agility, including ensuring brand consistency, scaling agility across the marketing ecosystem, managing data privacy concerns, pursuing marketing agility as a fad, and hiring marketing leaders. The authors identify the antecedents of marketing agility at the organizational, team, marketing leadership and employee levels and provide a roadmap for future research. The authors caution that marketing agility may not be well-suited for all firms and all marketing activities.
Keywords: Marketing Agility, Agile Marketing, Sensemaking, Iteration, Experimentation, Speed.
New technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), virtual assistants, chatbots, and robots, which are typically powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), are dramatically transforming the customer experience. In this paper, we offer a fresh typology of new technologies powered by AI and propose a new framework for understanding the role of new technologies on the customer/shopper journey. Specifically, we discuss the impact and implications of these technologies on each broad stage of the shopping journey (pre-transaction, transaction, and post-transaction) and advance a new conceptualization for managing these new AI technologies along customer experience dimensions to create experiential value. We discuss future research ideas emanating from our framework and outline interdisciplinary research avenues.
Purpose
Mobile instant messaging (MIM) is changing how we communicate with customers transforming what we used to buy as products into services. Servitization is the strategy by which the services offered in combination with a product become a central part of the offer and the value. This paper aims to focus on a new way to do business by means of mobile conversational commerce identified as a unique touchpoint for customers who wish to experience the product/service.
Design/methodology/approach
This research uses the case study method and mobile content analysis of WhatsApp conversations between customer and manufacturing firm to illustrate how an artisan company succeeded with customers using MIM to track the customer journey and engage the customer during the conversation. The customer journey theory and customer engagement cycle were used to detecting the main themes
Findings
The results demonstrate that by channeling a mix between engagement and service practices into one direct touchpoint, it is possible to follow the customers throughout their journey and detect their satisfaction. Nevertheless, the research finds that new skills are needed: two-way communication skills, suitability and social CRM skills.
Practical implications
The results provide guidance for services providers on how to improve customer experience management by allocating investment to conversational commerce as a new way of promoting the customer experience for the digital transformation of manufacturing firms.
Originality/value
This research investigates the importance of human interaction in the digital servitization as a pillar of commerce in this type of service. The paper analyzes the results from the perspective of the supplier of the service and from the perspective of customer experience.
Previous studies of in-store decision making have assumed that motivations for unplanned purchases are homogeneous throughout a shopping trip. In response to this assumption, the authors develop a conceptual framework to explain how consumers’ internal (i.e., intrinsic) and external (i.e., extrinsic) motivations for unplanned purchases actually vary during a shopping trip. Two field studies and five online experiments provide evidence that the personality trait of buying impulsivity predicts differences in whether a shopper initially focuses on internal motivations (e.g., “because I love it”) or external motivations (e.g., “because it is on sale”) for unplanned purchases at the beginning of a shopping trip and, consistent with a mechanism of motivation balancing, that motivations for unplanned purchases change as a shopper satisfies their initial motivations. The studies also demonstrate how the level of buying impulsivity influences the effectiveness of point-of-purchase messages at stimulating unplanned purchases and consumers’ relative spending on unplanned purchases. Overall, these findings address conflicting results in previous shopping studies, advance the literature streams on consumer motivation and sequential choice, and contribute insights to enhance shopper-marketing programs.
This study focuses on channel choices in motor insurance. Our aims are twofold: to fill a gap of empirical studies on the determinants of multichannel behavior in the insurance industry and to help companies improve their retail strategies by better predicting customers’ channel decisions, using a set of psychographic and channel-experience variables. The paper adopts a broad set of personal and digital channels and new dimensions of customer profiling, including the preference (need) for personal contact. We identify four different customer journeys, based on channel combinations. Our web-based survey, which has turned out 338 valid responses, shows that the majority of insurance customers adopt multichannel search behaviors. However, although most of the search is carried out through digital media, such channels generate low search-to-purchase conversion rates. Most customer journeys are, instead, finalized in the personal channels (namely, the insurance agents), thus evidencing an interesting webrooming effect. We test our set of hypotheses on the determinants of such customer journeys with a multinomial logistic regression. Our findings show that multichannel journeys can serve several purposes: they may reflect the customer need to collect more information, the customer preference for shopping innovation; and his/her preference for shopping convenience. Corporate channel management strategies and practices shall consider such determinants and be revised accordingly.
Four online grocery‐shopping experiments and one field study using video‐tracking technology at a grocery store document how shoppers' motivation evolves from the beginning to the end of their shopping trips. We uncover unique motivational patterns as shoppers achieve multiple sub‐goals (i.e., choose multiple grocery items) to complete their trips: a monotonic decrease in motivation for shoppers with a shopping list, versus a curvilinear trend (i.e., decrease then increase) in motivation for shoppers without a list. In addition, we demonstrate how to reverse the observed patterns for shoppers with a list by changing their reference points for tracking progress. The discovery of the moderating role of shopping‐list usage adds to the bubbling dialogue in goal pursuit and shopper psychology research concerning how consumer motivation follows either a monotonic trend (e.g., a goal gradient effect) or a nonmonotonic trend (e.g., the stuck‐in‐the‐middle effect). Importantly, we demonstrate how the stuck‐in‐the‐middle theory, which applies to single‐goal pursuits, can apply more broadly to such consumer domains as grocery shopping, where it pertains to the generation and completion of multiple sub‐goals. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
The purpose of this exploratory and quantitative study was to examine the attitudes and behaviors of 14,807 grocery shoppers. These respondents across the US were asked to answer attitudinal, behavioral, and demographic related questions. Shoppers were profiled by analyzing their responses to 16 relevant attitudinal and behavioral questions. A cluster analysis was performed followed by a discriminant analysis to determine attitudinal and behavioral variables explaining cluster membership. A cross-tabulation analysis assessed demographic variables that correlated with cluster membership. Two clusters were identified: high and low involvement grocery shoppers. In an event that has long been perceived as low involvement, a large percentage (53%) can be categorized as high involvement grocery shoppers. These shoppers tend to be younger. They were more likely to enjoy the hunt of finding products/deals, seek the advice of others and perceive that the products they buy reflect upon them. Grocery stores have a significant opportunity to target this high involvement shopper. Grocery stores will need to create an integrative, engaging online and in-store experience to attract high involvement shoppers and ultimately increase store loyalty. The results of this research has significant communication, branding and digital marketing implications.
To study consumer brand misinformation, we run in-store blind taste tests with a retailer’s private label food brands and the leading national brand counterparts in three large consumer packaged goods categories. Subjects self-report very high expectations about the quality of the private labels relative to national brands. However, they predict a relatively low probability of choosing them in a blind taste test. An overwhelming majority systematically choose the private label in the blinded test. Using program evaluation methods, we find that the causal effect of this intervention on treated consumers increases their market share for the tested private label product by 15 share points during the week after the intervention, on top of a base share of 8 share points. However, the effect diminishes to 8 share points during the second to fourth weeks after the test and to 2 share points during the second to fifth months after the test. Using a structural model of demand that controls for the self-selected participation and allows for heterogeneous treatment effects, we show that these effects survive controls for point-of-purchase prices, purchase incidence, and the feedback effects of brand loyalty. We also find that the intervention increases the preference for the private label brands, and that it decreases the preference for the national brands, relative to the outside good. Interpreting the intervention as an information treatment about the product, we find evidence consistent with an economically large informational barrier on demand for the private label product relative to an established national brand.
This research investigates how the fundamental desire for control affects product acquisition. The authors propose that consumers compensate for a loss of perceived control by buying utilitarian products (e.g., household cleaning agents) because of these products' association with problem solving, a quality that promotes a sense of control. Study 1 demonstrates this basic effect in a field setting involving real purchases, while studies 2 and 3 show that framing a product as utilitarian (vs. hedonic) moderates the effect of control on purchase intentions. Study 4 shows that a generalized problem-solving tendency mediates the effect of control on eagerness to pursue utilitarian consumption. Given the pervasiveness and ease of using product acquisition as a means to cope with psychological threat, this research has important implications for theory and practice.
Continual innovation and new technology are critical in helping retailers’ create a sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, shopper-facing technology plays an important role in increasing revenues and decreasing costs. In this article, we briefly discuss some of the salient retail technologies over the recent past as well as technologies that are only beginning to gain traction. Additionally, we present a shopper-centric decision calculus that retailers can use when considering a new shopper-facing technology. We argue that new technologies provide value by either increasing revenue through (a) attracting new shoppers, (b) increasing share of volume from existing shoppers, or (c) extracting greater consumer surplus, or decreasing costs through offloading labor to shoppers. Importantly, our framework incorporates shoppers by considering their perceptions of the new technology and their resulting behavioral reactions. Specifically, we argue that shoppers update their perceptions of fairness, value, satisfaction, trust, commitment, and attitudinal loyalty and evaluate the potential intrusiveness of the technology on their personal privacy. These perceptions then mediate the effect of the technology on shopper behavioral reactions such as retail patronage intentions and WOM communication. We present preliminary support for our framework by examining consumers’ perceptions of several new retail technologies, as well as their behavioral intentions. The findings support our thesis that shopper perceptions of the retailer are affected by new shopper-facing technologies and that these reactions mediate behavioral intentions, which in turn drives the ROI of the new technology.
Consumer goods and services have psychological value that can equal or exceed their functional value. A burgeoning literature demonstrates that one source of value emerges from the capacity for products to serve as a psychological salve that reduces various forms of distress across numerous domains. This review systematically organizes and integrates the literature on the use of consumer behavior as a means to regulate self-discrepancies, or the incongruities between how one currently perceives oneself and how one desires to view oneself (Higgins, 1987). We introduce a Compensatory Consumer Behavior Model to explain the psychological consequences of self-discrepancies on consumer behavior. This model delineates five distinct strategies by which consumers cope with self-discrepancies: direct resolution, symbolic self-completion, dissociation, escapism, and fluid compensation. Finally, the authors raise critical research questions to guide future research endeavors. Overall, the present review provides both a primer on compensatory consumer behavior and sets an agenda for future research.
Shopping is an integral part of our everyday lives. Common wisdom suggests that many consumers engage in shopping and buying as a means to repair their negative feelings - a notion commonly referred to as retail therapy. However, does retail therapy really work? The present monograph seeks to address this question by proposing a tripartite approach, reviewing and organizing relevant research in marketing and consumer psychology based on this tripartite framework: (1) motivational (the goals and motives that consumers have for shopping); (2) behavioral (the activities in which consumers engage during the shopping process); and (3) emotional (the feelings that consumers experience while shopping). Although accumulating evidence suggests that retail therapy does work to a certain extent, simultaneously considering the three perspectives in future empirical investigation helps to further improve our understanding of the antecedents, underlying mechanisms, and consequences of retail therapy. Accordingly, a number of questions and directions for future research on the topic of retail therapy are discussed, drawing upon the proposed tripartite framework.
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 observe a move to so-called omni-channel retailing. Omni-channel retailing is taking a broader perspective on channels and how shoppers are influenced and move through channels in their search and buying process. We discuss this development conceptually and subsequently discuss existing research in this multi-channel retailing. We also introduce the articles in this special issue on multi-channel retailing and position these articles in the new omni-channel movement. We end with putting forward a research agenda to further guide future research in this area.
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 within each of these areas. We then discuss methodological issues pertaining to the use of experimentation and econometrics. Our framework suggests that brand and channel choices are closely intertwined, and therefore studying them jointly will reveal a deeper understanding of consumer decision making in the modern marketing environment.
Typically, shoppers' paths only cover less than half of the areas in a grocery store. Given that shoppers often use physical products in the store as external memory cues, encouraging shoppers to travel more of the store may increase unplanned spending. Estimating the direct effect of in-store travel distance on unplanned spending, however, is complicated by the difficulty of collecting in-store path data and the endogeneity of in-store travel distance. To address both issues, the authors collect a novel data set using in-store radio frequency identification tracking and develop an instrumental variable approach to account for endogeneity. Their analysis reveals that the elasticity of unplanned spending on travel distance is 57% higher than the uncorrected ordinary least squares estimate. Simulations based on the authors' estimates suggest that strategically promoting three product categories through mobile promotion could increase unplanned spending by 16.1%, compared with the estimated effect of a benchmark strategy based on relocating three destination categories (7.2%). Furthermore, the authors conduct a field experiment to assess the effectiveness of mobile promotions and find that a coupon that required shoppers to travel farther from their planned path resulted in a substantial increase in unplanned spending ($21.29) over a coupon for an unplanned category near their planned path ($13.83). The results suggest that targeted mobile promotions aimed at increasing in-store path length can increase unplanned spending.
The subject of service convenience is important in service economies, yet little is known about this topic. The consumer convenience literature-strong in certain respects, underdeveloped in other respects-gives insufficient attention to service convenience. The prevailing pattern is either to treat service convenience generally or to lump services and goods together into an overall convenience construct. The authors seek to stimulate a higher level of research activity and dialogue by proposing a more comprehensive and multidimensional conceptualization of service convenience and a model delineating its antecedents and consequences. The authors build their case by systematically examining the convenience literature, explicating the dimensions and types of service convenience, developing the overall model and related research propositions, and presenting directions for further research.
The authors explore product category and customer characteristics that affect consumers' likelihood of engaging in unplanned purchases. In addition, they examine consumer activities that can exacerbate or limit these effects. The authors employ a hierarchical modeling approach to test their hypotheses using a data set of in-store intercept interviews conducted with 2300 consumers across 28 stores. The results show that category characteristics, such as purchase frequency and displays, and customer characteristics, such as household size and gender, affect in-store decision making. Moreover, although the analysis reveals that the baseline probability of an unplanned purchase is 46%, the contextual factors can drive this probability as high as 93%. The results support the predictions that list use, more frequent trips, limiting the aisles visited, limiting time spent in the store, and paying by cash are effective strategies for decreasing the likelihood of making unplanned purchases.
four studies investigate the interactive influence of the presence of an accompanying friend and a consumer’s agency–communion orientation on the consumer’s spending behaviors. in general, the authors find that shopping with a friend can be expensive for agency-oriented consumers (e.g., males) but not for communion-oriented consumers (e.g., females). That is, consumers who are agency oriented spend significantly more when they shop with a friend (vs. when they shop alone), whereas this effect is attenuated for consumers who are communion oriented. The results also show that this interactive effect is moderated by individual differences in self-monitoring such that friends are especially influential for consumers who are high in self-monitoring, but the effects occur in opposite directions for agency- and communion-oriented consumers (i.e., agentic consumers spend more with a friend, while communal consumers spend less when accompanied by a friend). Finally, the authors test the underlying process and document that the interaction of agency–communion orientation, the presence of a friend, and self monitoring
is reversed when the focal context is changed from “spending for the self” to “donating to a charity.” They conclude with a discussion of implications for research and practice.
This paper examines a purchase context in which consumers, instead of deciding on their own, delegate either a part of or the entire purchase decision to a surrogate. A path model linking the antecedent variables and delegation is tested in the context of personal computer purchases. It was found that the factors that ensure decision quality emanating from the surrogate's expertise differentials, trustworthiness, accountability, and willingness to customize increase the likelihood of decision delegation. In addition to its direct positive effect on delegation, trustworthiness mediates the effect of expertise difference, surrogate accountability, and customization on delegation. Perceived loss of control inhibits delegation, but only at the stage when the final choice decision is made. Also, if a decision task is repeatable, the high return on effort has a negative effect on delegation, but only at attribute set and choice set delegations. Contributions of the study and directions for future research are discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Many retailers believe that a majority of purchases are unplanned, so they spend heavily on in-store marketing to stimulate these types of purchases. At the same time, the effects of "preshopping" factors-the shoppers' overall trip goals, store-specific shopping objectives, and prior marketing exposures-are largely unexplored. The authors focus on these out-of-store drivers and, unlike prior research, use panel data to "hold the shopper constant" while estimating unbiased trip-level effects. Thus, they uncover opportunities for retailers to generate more unplanned buying from existing shoppers. The authors find that the amount of unplanned buying increases monotonically with the abstractness of the overall shopping trip goal that is established before the shopper enters the store. Storelinked goals also affect unplanned buying; unplanned buying is higher on trips in which the shopper chooses the store for favorable pricing and lower on trips in which the shopper chooses the store as part of a multistore shopping trip. Although out-of-store marketing has no direct effect, it reinforces the lift in unplanned buying from shoppers who use marketing materials inside the store. The authors discuss the implications for retailers.
This research finds that merely touching an object results in an increase in perceived ownership of that object. For nonowners, or buyers, perceived ownership can be increased with either mere touch or with imagery encouraging touch. Perceived ownership can also be increased through touch for legal owners, or sellers of an object. We also explore valuation of an object and conclude that it is jointly influenced by both perceived ownership and by the valence of the touch experience. We discuss the implications of this research for online and traditional retailers as well as for touch research and endowment effect research.
In recent years, manufacturers have become increasingly disposed toward the use of sales promotions, often at the cost of advertising. Yet the long-term implications of these changes for brand profitability remain unclear. In this paper, we seek to offer insights into this important issue. We consider the questions of i) whether it is more desirable to advertise or promote, ii) whether it is better to use frequent, shallow promotions or infrequent, deep promotions, and iii) how changes in regular prices affect sales relative to increases in price promotions. Additional insights regarding brand equity, the relative magnitude of short- and long-term effects, and the decomposition of advertising and promotion elasticities across choice and quantity decisions are obtained.
To address these points, we develop a heteroscedastic, varying-parameter joint probit choice and regression quantity model. Our approach allows consumers' responses to short-term marketing activities to change in response to changes in marketing actions over the long term. We also accommodate the possibility of competitive reactions to policy changes of a brand. The model is estimated for a consumer packaged good category by using over eight years of panel data. The resulting parameters enable us to assess the effects of changes in advertising and promotion policies on sales and profits.
Our results show that, in the long term, advertising has a positive effect on “brand equity” while promotions have a negative effect. Furthermore, we find price promotion elasticities to be larger than regular price elasticities in the short term, but smaller than regular price elasticities when long-term effects are considered. Consistent with previous research, we also find that most of the effect of a price cut is manifested in consumers' brand choice decisions in the short term, but when long-term effects are again considered, this result no longer holds. Last, we estimate that the long-term effects of promotions on sales are negative overall, and about two-fifths the magnitude of the positive short-term effects.
Finally, making reasonable cost and margin assumptions, we conduct simulations to assess the relative profit impact of long-term changes in pricing, advertising, or promotion policies. Our results show regular price decreases to have a generally negative effect on the long-term profits of brands, advertising to be profitable for two of the brands, and increases in price promotions to be uniformly unprofitable.
In many previous studies of consumer behavior, shopping has been equated with buying. This research examines the concept of
browsing—the examination of a retailer’s merchandise without a current intent to buy. Results indicate that for the product
classes of clothing and personal computers, browsing is related to perceptions of relevant dimensions of the retail environment.
In addition, heavy browsers are more involved with the product, are more knowledgeable, and are more likely to be opinion
leaders than are other consumers. Suggestions for future research are also noted.
This paper proposes a two-factor conceptualization of exploratory consumer buying behavior in which exploratory acquisition of products is distinguished from exploratory information seeking. A scale for measuring individual differences in consumers' tendencies to engage in exploratory buying behavior is developed based on this conceptualization, and the instrument is related to several other constructs and actual exploratory behaviors. The results of six studies with subjects from two different countries show that the scale has good psychometric properties and that its relationships with other constructs and actual exploratory behaviors conform to theoretical expectations.
Online consumer product review is an emerging market phenomenon that is playing an increasingly important role in consumers' purchase decisions. This paper examines a fundamental issue concerning online consumer review, i.e., the functions such reviews have for an online marketer. We argue that online consumer reviews, a type of product information created by users based on personal usage experience, can serve as a new element of marketing communications mix and work as free sales assistants to help consumers identify the products that best match their idiosyncratic usage conditions. For many products, this marketing function is impossible or very costly for traditional marketing communications to achieve. However, this new communication mode does not come without cost because it eliminates a seller's control over the content of product information accessible to consumers, and because consumer reviews may not be fully informative.We examine four specific strategic issues: (1) when an online seller should provide consumer reviews to its customers, (2) how a seller's decision to supply consumer reviews interacts with its product assortment strategy, (3) how the seller's strategy regarding the supply of consumer reviews interacts with its traditional marketing communication strategy, and (4) what timing is best for the seller to offer consumer review information for a product.Our results show that supplying online consumer reviews can benefit or hurt an online seller depending on product characteristics, the informativeness of the review, the seller's product assortment strategy, the seller's product value for the partially matched consumers, and consumer heterogeneity in product consumption expertise. We also show that the seller's decision to provide consumer reviews will increase its incentive to offer more complete product information to consumers through its traditional marketing communications. Finally, we discover that offering consumer review information too early leads to a lower profit.An empirical study based on data from online sellers in different product categories provides some preliminary support for our theory.
An impediment to Web-based retail sales is the impersonal nature of Web-based shopping. A solution to this problem is to use an avatar to deliver product information. An avatar is a graphic representation that can be animated by means of computer technology. Study 1 shows that using an avatar sales agent leads to more satisfaction with the retailer, a more positive attitude toward the product, and a greater purchase intention. Study 2 shows that an attractive avatar is a more effective sales agent at moderate levels of product involvement, but an expert avatar is a more effective sales agent at high levels of product involvement.
Every finite noncooperative game can be presented as a weighted network congestion game, and also as a network congestion game with player-specific costs. In the first presentation, different players may contribute differently to congestion, and in the second, they are differently (negatively) affected by it. This paper shows that the topology of the underlying (undirected two-terminal) network provides information about the existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in the game. For some networks, but not for others, every corresponding game has at least one such equilibrium. For the weighted presentation, a complete characterization of the networks with this property is given. The necessary and sufficient condition is that the network has at most three routes that do traverse any edge in opposite directions, or it consists of several such networks connected in series. The corresponding problem for player-specific costs remains open.
Although the relationship metaphor dominates contemporary marketing thought and practice, surprisingly little empirical work has been conducted on relational phenomena in the consumer products domain, particularly at the level of the brand. In this article, the author: (1) argues for the validity of the relationship proposition in the consumer-brand context, including a debate as to the legiti- macy of the brand as an active relationship partner and empirical support for the phenomenological significance of consumer-brand bonds; (2) provides a framework for characterizing and better understanding the types of relationships consumers form with brands; and (3) inducts from the data the concept of brand relationship quality, a diagnostic tool for conceptualizing and evaluating relation- ship strength. Three in-depth case studies inform this agenda, their interpretation guided by an integrative review of the literature on person-to-person relationships. Insights offered through application of inducted concepts to two relevant research domains—brand loyalty and brand personality—are advanced in closing. The exercise is intended to urge fellow researchers to refine, test, and augment the working hypotheses suggested herein and to progress toward these goals with confidence in the validity of the relationship premise at the level of consumers' lived experiences with their brands.
This study examines the role of optimum stimulation level (SOL) in exploratory consumer behavior. The concept of SOL and its measurement are discussed, and the literature on exploratory consumer tendencies and their relationship with SOL is reviewed. Hypotheses are developed concerning the relationship between SOL and cognitive responses to ads, ad repetition, information search, variety seeking, decision making under risk, gambling, and innovative behavior, and these hypotheses are investigated in a series of experiments. Four well-known instruments are used to measure people's characteristic preference for stimulation, and SOL is operationally as a weighted composite of a person's score on these scales. The results of the study indicate that consumers' SOL is systematically related to curiosity-motivated consumer behaviors, variety seeking, and risk taking. Copyright 1992 by the University of Chicago.
While consumer search behavior has been studied for many years, its treatment has been limited to purchase contexts. This article defines ongoing search as search occurring outside of the purchase process, and places it within an overall framework for consumer search. In addition, it presents results of an exploratory study of ongoing search indicating that recreational or hedonic motives for ongoing search are more significant than practical, informational motives. This study also shows that product involvement is strongly linked to ongoing search and that ongoing searchers appear to be important elements in the marketplace.
The authors conduct four controlled lab experiments and one field study in a brick-and-mortar grocery store to demonstrate that relative spending—the price of the purchased item relative to the mean price of the product category—evolves nonlinearly and distinctly for budget and nonbudget shoppers. While the relative spending of budget shoppers evolves in a concave manner, the relative spending of nonbudget shoppers evolves inversely in a convex manner. Thus, budget (nonbudget) shoppers spend relatively more (less) in the middle than at the beginning and toward the end of their shopping trip. Mediation analyses confirm that the pain of paying experienced while shopping drives price salience, which then drives relative spending. Moreover, manipulating shoppers’ pain of paying, by altering the opportunity costs associated with their spending or drawing shoppers’ attention to their spending via real-time spending feedback, is shown to influence these spending patterns. The research offers theoretical contributions to the in-store decision-making, budgeting, and pain-of-paying literature and has important implications for marketing and promotion strategies in retail and mobile technology environments, as it suggests when a shopper may be more sensitive to price-related factors.
The Howard-Sheth buyer behavior model was cast in the form of a multiple-equation regression model for testing data on a grocery product in a specific market. Estimated structural parameters were generally consistent with the model's predictions, but some goodness-of-fit measures were weak. The model was useful for organizing this analysis of consumer behavior, but the test put extreme pressure on the data. Considerably improved data collection techniques and procedures will be needed before the full empirical potential of such models will be realized.
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 and delivering positive customer experiences. In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. To achieve this goal, they examine existing definitions and conceptualizations of customer experience as a construct and provide a historical perspective of the roots of customer experience within marketing. Next, they attempt to bring together what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience management. Finally, they identify critical areas for future research on this important topic.
The intersection of mobile marketing and shopper marketing, known as mobile shopper marketing, is a rapidly evolving area. We formally define mobile shopper marketing as the planning and execution of all mobile-based marketing activities that influence a shopper along and beyond the path-to-purchase: from the initial shopping trigger, to the purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation stages. However, not much is known about mobile shopper marketing. We plug this gap by first discussing mobile shopper marketing and its scope in depth and then presenting a process model that connects the mobile shopping journey with four key entities, i.e., shopper, employee, organization, and mobile technology. For each of these themes, we identify the challenges that offer future research opportunities.
Do people shop simply to make purchases? Are some shopping trips motivated by considerations that are unrelated to an actual purchase? The results of an exploratory study of shopper motivation suggest that a person may shop for many reasons other than his or her need for products or services.
The Howard-Sheth buyer behavior model was cast in the form of a multiple-equation regression model for testing data on a grocery product in a specific market. Estimated structural parameters were generally consistent with the model's predictions, but some goodness-of-fit measures were weak. The model was useful for organizing this analysis of consumer behavior, but the test put extreme pressure on the data. Considerably improved data collection techniques and procedures will be needed before the full empirical potential of such models will be realized.
Despite the popular use of social media by consumers and marketers, empirical research investigating their economic values still lags. In this study, we integrate qualitative user-marketer interaction content data from a fan page brand community on Facebook and consumer transactions data to assemble a unique data set at the individual consumer level. We then quantify the impact of community contents from consumers (user-generated content, i.e., UGC) and marketers (marketer-generated content, i.e., MGC) on consumers’ apparel purchase expenditures. A content analysis method was used to construct measures to capture the informative and persuasive nature of UGC and MGC while distinguishing between directed and undirected communication modes on the brand community. In our empirical analysis, we exploit differences across consumers’ fan page joining decision and across timing differences in fan page joining dates for our model estimation and identification strategies. Importantly, we also control for potential self-selection biases and relevant factors such as pricing, promotion, social network attributes, consumer demographics and unobserved heterogeneity. Our findings show that engagement in social media brand communities lead to a positive increase in purchase expenditures. Additional in-depth examinations of UGC and MGC impacts show robust evidence that social media brand community contents affect consumer purchase behavior through embedded information and persuasion. Evidence also points to the different roles played by UGC and MGC, varying by the type of directed or undirected communication modes by consumers and the marketer. Specifically, the elasticities of UGC information richness are 0.006 (directed communication) and 3.140 (undirected communication), whereas those of MGC information richness are insignificant. Moreover, the elasticity of UGC valence is 0.180 (undirected communication), while that of MGC valence is 0.004 (directed communication). Overall, UGC exhibits a stronger impact than MGC on consumer purchase behavior. Our findings provide various implications for academic research and practice.
Many retailers believe that a majority of purchases are unplanned, so they spend heavily on in-store marketing to stimulate these types of purchases. At the same time, the effects of “preshopping” factors—the shoppers' overall trip goals, store-specific shopping objectives, and prior marketing exposures—are largely unexplored. The authors focus on these out-of-store drivers and, unlike prior research, use panel data to “hold the shopper constant” while estimating unbiased trip-level effects. Thus, they uncover opportunities for retailers to generate more unplanned buying from existing shoppers. The authors find that the amount of unplanned buying increases monotonically with the abstractness of the overall shopping trip goal that is established before the shopper enters the store. Store-linked goals also affect unplanned buying; unplanned buying is higher on trips in which the shopper chooses the store for favorable pricing and lower on trips in which the shopper chooses the store as part of a multistore shopping trip. Although out-of-store marketing has no direct effect, it reinforces the lift in unplanned buying from shoppers who use marketing materials inside the store. The authors discuss the implications for retailers.
While the interest in smart shopping carts is growing, both retailers and consumer groups have concerns about how real-time spending feedback will influence shopping behavior. Building on budgeting and spending theories, the authors conduct three lab and grocery store experiments, the results of which robustly show a diverging impact of real-time spending feedback depending on whether a person is budget constrained (“budget” shoppers) or not (“nonbudget” shoppers). Although real-time spending feedback stimulates budget shoppers to increase their total spending by buying a greater number of national brands, it has the opposite impact on nonbudget shoppers; feedback leads nonbudget shoppers to reduce their total spending by replacing national brands with store brands. Smart shopping carts increase repatronage intentions for budget shoppers while keeping them stable for nonbudget shoppers. These findings underscore fundamental unexplored differences between budget and nonbudget shoppers. Moreover, they have key implications for both brick-and-mortar and online retailers, as well as app developers.
Previous research on coupon proneness has measured the construct only in behavioral terms (i. e., consumers who are more responsive to coupon promotions are coupon prone). On the basis of the study premise that at least one other psychological construct, value consciousness, underlies the behavior of redeeming coupons, the authors argue that coupon proneness should be conceptualized and measured at a psychological level and treated as one construct that affects coupon-responsive behavior rather than as isomorphic with the behavior. They offer conceptual definitions of both coupon proneness and value consciousness and make a theoretical distinction based on acquisition-transaction utility theory. Eight hypotheses that reflect theoretical differences between the two constructs are proposed and tested. Results support the study premise that coupon-responsive behavior is a manifestation of both value consciousness and coupon proneness.
Multichannel customer management is “the design, deployment, and evaluation of channels to enhance customer value through effective customer acquisition, retention, and development” (Neslin, Scott A., D. Grewal, R. Leghorn, V. Shankar, M. L. Teerling, J. S. Thomas, P. C. Verhoef (2006), Challenges and Opportunities in Multichannel Management. Journal of Service Research 9(2) 95–113). Channels typically include the store, the Web, catalog, sales force, third party agency, call center and the like. In recent years, multichannel marketing has grown tremendously and is anticipated to grow even further. While we have developed a good understanding of certain issues such as the relative value of a multichannel customer over a single channel customer, several research and managerial questions still remain. We offer an overview of these emerging issues, present our future outlook, and suggest important avenues for future research.
This review focuses on the research conducted over the years on the effects of facility-based environmental cues, or “atmospherics”, on buyer behavior. We review the pertinent literature by constructing a comprehensive table of the empirical studies in this area that focuses on the various findings associated with these investigations. This summary table indicates that atmospheric variables influence a wide variety of consumer evaluations and behaviors. In addition to discussing the findings and contributions of this literature stream, the article concludes by identifying gaps in the literature and suggesting potential future topics for atmospheric related research.
“Retail therapy” is often applied to the notion of trying to cheer oneself up through the purchase of self-treats. The negative moods that lead to retail therapy, however, have also been associated with greater impulsivity and a lack of behavioral control. Does this lead to mindless shopping when consumers are “down” and regret later? The current work documents that a bad mood does lead to greater purchase and consumption of unplanned treats for the self. However, it also provides evidence that the consumption of self-treats can be strategically motivated. Those individuals who do indulge can also exercise restraint if the goal of restraint also leads to improved mood. Finally, retail therapy has lasting positive impacts on mood. Feelings of regret and guilt are not associated with the unplanned purchases made to repair a bad mood. The implications of the research are discussed. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Shopper marketing refers to the planning and execution of all marketing activities that influence a shopper along, and beyond, the entire path-to-purchase, from the point at which the motivation to shop first emerges through to purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation. The goal of shopper marketing is to enable a win–win–win solution for the shopper–retailer–manufacturer. Shopper marketing has emerged as a key managerial practice among manufacturers and retailers, who are eagerly embracing innovations in the different aspects of shopper marketing. We review current and potential innovations in shopper marketing. We identify the managerial challenges to achieving new win–win–win solutions among shoppers, manufacturers, and retailers in shopper marketing and outline future scenarios and research issues related to these challenges.Highlights► Shopper marketing – activities that influence a shopper along the shopping cycle – aims at enabling a win-win-win solution for the shopper-retailer-manufacturer. ► Emerging innovations in shopper marketing include those on digital marketing activities, multichannel marketing, store atmospherics and design, in-store merchandising, metrics, and organization. ► Major underexplored research issues related to shopping cycle include: new insight generation through non-traditional discoveries, interaction effects of rational, emotional drivers, individual and environmental factors on shopper behavior, collection and linking of data to insights and shopper marketing actions, allocation of shopper marketing budget for different out-of-store and in-store marketing activities, alignment of incentives of the shoppers, retailers and manufacturers, and use of multiple channels to influence shopper decisions.
We study the moderating effects of household (e.g., shopping frequency) and product (e.g., sensory nature) characteristics on household brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity across online and offline channels for grocery products. We analyze the shopping behavior of the same households that shop interchangeably in the online and offline stores of the same grocery chain in 93 categories of food, non-food, sensory and non-sensory products. We find that households are more brand loyal, more size loyal but less price sensitive in the online channel than in the offline channel. Brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity are closely related to household and product characteristics. Light online shoppers exhibit the highest brand and size loyalties, but the lowest price sensitivity in the online channel. Heavy online shoppers display the lowest brand and size loyalties, but the highest price sensitivity in the online channel. Moderate online shoppers exhibit the highest price sensitivity in the offline channel. The online–offline differences in brand loyalty and price sensitivity are largest for light online shoppers and smallest for heavy online shoppers. The online–offline differences in brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity are larger for food products and for sensory products.
The authors develop and test a probabilistic model of purchase incidence and brand choice for frequently purchased consumer products. The model incorporates two ways of shopping in a category. Shoppers who have planned their purchasing (made a decision before entering the store) do not process in-store information and show no response to point-of-purchase promotions. Consumers who have not planned their purchasing in a category (deciding at the point of purchase) may process in-store information and may be strongly influenced by promotions. The two modes of information processing are called decision states and are labelled , respectively. The two-state model is calibrated on IRI scanner purchase records for saltine crackers. The model yields a significantly better fit than a one-state nested logit model and provides new insights into the relationship between shopping behavior and consumer purchase response.
Given the increasing importance of entertainment as a retailing strategy, this study identifies a comprehensive inventory of consumers’ hedonic shopping motivations. Based on exploratory qualitative and quantitative studies, a six-factor scale is developed that consists of adventure, gratification, role, value, social, and idea shopping motivations. Using the six-factor hedonic shopping motivation profiles, a cluster analysis of adult consumers reveals five shopper segments, called here the Minimalists, the Gatherers, the Providers, the Enthusiasts, and the Traditionalists. The utility of the proposed scale is discussed both for future research and retail strategy.
While some retailers may discourage groups of teenagers from shopping in their stores, there is reason to believe that peer groups may affect teen behaviors and evaluations in ways that could benefit retailers. In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of teenagers’ shopping with friends, and, in particular, whether shopping with friends might enhance teens’ attitudes toward retailing and their tendency to spend more when shopping with friends. We also examine why teens shop with friends. Specifically, we relate friends’ knowledge and teens’ age to teenagers’ susceptibility to informational and normative influence from friends. Susceptibility to peer influence is then related to various aspects of teen shopping, such as frequency and enjoyment of shopping with pals, which, in turn, are related to sentiment toward retailing and spending tendencies. With the exception of susceptibility to normative influence, results based on data from a sample of high school students generally supported the model.
We investigate two key group-level determinants of virtual community participation—group norms and social identity—and consider their motivational antecedents and mediators.We also introduce a marketing-relevant typology to conceptualize virtual communities, based on the distinction between network-based and small-group-based virtual communities. Our survey-based study, which was conducted across a broad range of virtual communities, supports the proposed model and finds further that virtual community type moderates consumers' reasons for participating, as well as the strengths of their impact on group norms and social identity. We conclude with a consideration of managerial and research implications of the findings.
In this article, we study e-commerce customer behaviour towards online shops. The theoretical model is based on Triandis' behavioural framework. Prior value research has mostly focused on users' attitudes towards online shopping. We explore the role of perceived value and habit in e-commerce behaviour. Structure equation results suggest that the utilitarian as well as the hedonic values have a significant impact on affect, and indirectly also on e-commerce behaviour. We also assessed the importance of habit on shoppers' online behaviour. According to our results, online shoppers' habitual behaviour has a significant impact on affect. We also found that normative beliefs (social factors) are the preceding factor of habit in cases in which the shopping experience is not recurrent.
Existing research on household decision making is reviewed in terms of three questions: (1) Which family members are involved in economic decisions? (2) What is the nature of family decision processes? and (3) Are decision outcomes affected by differences in family role structure and decision strategies? Problem areas related to each of these questions are discussed, including an overemphasis on decision roles rather than processes and outcomes, noncomparable and insufficient measures of purchase influence, and marketing's preference for individual-based models of consumer behavior.