Adam P. Vrechopoulos’s research while affiliated with Athens University of Economics and Business and other places

The paper presents the results of the consumer surveys conducted by the Research Institute of Retail Consumer Goods in Greece from April to August 2020. The study shows important changes in consumer behavioral patterns and preferences compared to the pre-COVID period. It was found that consumers prefer to buy domestic products and visit bakery stores more frequently than other food retail stores. The weekly spending for family purchases does not differ among various time periods during the pandemic, while price discounts and free products reported as the most desired promotional campaigns. Regarding online supermarkets, consumers are dissatisfied with delivery time and satisfied with the alternative payment methods and delivery staff and evaluate health protection measures differently with the "use of protective gloves by the store personnel" evaluated with the highest score.

This article examines omnichannel redemption options when issuing digital coupons over social media. It investigates which channels or combinations of them provide optimal performance in terms of service-quality perception, customer satisfaction, and revenue. For that purpose, it compares three omnichannel redeeming options employing a between-participant quasi-experimental design that utilizes the primary data of a sporting goods retailer in Greece and a questionnaire as a data-collection instrument to investigate cause and effect relationships. Those three omnichannel redeeming options are analyzed in two pairwise comparisons: (a) multichannel (both online and offline) vs. offline-only (physical store), and (b) multichannel (both online and offline) vs. online-only (online store). Results reveal that while perceived service quality is essential to improve customer satisfaction, especially if satisfying the need for interaction with service employees, revenue performance depends only on the availability of multiple redemption options. Theoretical, practical, and research implications are thoroughly discussed at the end.

The continuous adoption of environmental sensitive strategies in the context of strategic marketing planning along with the wide diffusion of omnichannel business practices raised challenging research issues towards shedding more light on the mechanics through which such business attempts affect consumer behavior. In parallel, the growing academics’ and practitioners’ interest on measuring the overall customer experience across channels fuel the research need to investigate how customer experience is affected in the context of a continuously evolving business landscape. To this end, this study attempts to conceptualize the effects of green strategies on customer experience in the context of omnichannel retailing though the development of an interdisciplinary conceptual model positioned in the fields of Marketing and Electronic Commerce. For that purpose, the study thoroughly reviews the relevant literature and formulates direct research questions supported by theoretical insights and evolving business practices which are reflected on the interrelationships of the derived conceptual model. This paper provides direct implications for research, as well as some straightforward managerial implications.

Consumer behavioral patterns radically changed during the last decades, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic. In parallel, digital technologies continuously substitute traditional business practices in the context of digital transformation attempts that were also significantly accelerated due to the pandemic. However, since technology cannot totally replace all human aspects in the retailer-consumer interaction process, an optimum blending of technical and human resources is crucial. This chapter reviews the latest developments and key aspects of this blending and emphasizes the consumers' needs for the provision of value-added services by retailers in the post-COVID-19 era. It advocates that retailing remains a retailer-consumer affair, where both humans and technologies take part in diversified interactions. It develops an integrated framework of human and technology components and channels between retailer-consumer interactions, aiming to provide a holistic view of the available capabilities and trends from both the retailer and the consumer perspective in the post-COVID-19 era.

In today's channel-centric retail ecosystem the right mix and orchestration of online and offline stimulus is paramount towards providing an optimal store atmosphere and shopping experience. Applying the S-O-R framework, this research explores additive omnichannel atmospheric cues stimuli, in order to discover their impact on affective (i.e., pleasure, arousal and dominance) and cognitive (i.e., store environmental quality perception) states and their consequential effect on consumer responses in the form of purchase intention. Employing a four-condition repeated measures experimental design in a physical store, utilizing mobile, IoT and social media channels (Study 1), as well as a between-subjects online lab experiment (Study 2), this research sheds light into the affective and cognition-mediated causal mechanisms that influence shopping outcomes. This work reveals that combining stimulus from all retail channels within the physical store (i.e., omnichannel atmospheric cues) increases consumers' pleasure, arousal and the quality of the environment as a whole, which in turn positively influences purchase intention. However, the impact of dominance is only prominent at the more controlled, laboratory setting, in which purchase intention increases while dominance attenuates.

The increasing adoption of three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality technologies in business practices requires an interdisciplinary research approach to study their effect. In this paper we investigate the effects of different 3D online store layouts on user perceptions in the e-retailing context. We build on recent research on store atmosphere that classifies store layouts in 3D environments as “avant-garde”, “warehouse”, “pragmatic”, “boutique” and “department”. Reflecting the dual identity of individuals as both consumers visiting virtual stores and users interacting with graphical user interfaces, we employ key constructs from both the marketing and the information systems literature to build our research model. The study measures how Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Merchandise Quality Perception and Store Perception vary across the distinct store layouts. We employ a laboratory experiment in the apparel industry to test our model. Our results show that the layouts lead to different perceptions, although the consumers’ Shopping Motivation does not moderate this effect. Building on the differences found on store layout effects on user/consumer behavior in the 3D online context, the paper discusses relevant research and practical implications.