The omnichannel continuum: Integrating online and offline channels along the customer journey

This paper provides a framework for conceptualizing omnichannel integration as a continuum, identifies phenomena that determine how firms should position along that continuum, and summarizes empirical research regarding these phenomena. The framework combines the customer journey (search to purchase to aftersales) and channel choice (online vs. offline). This generates a range of omnichannel strategies, anchored by “Unconnected” on one extreme and “Complete” on the other. In between, “Vertical” strategies integrate channels over the customer journey, while “Horizontal” strategies integrate across channels at a given stage in the customer journey. We draw on more than 200 articles to identify 10 consumer and marketing phenomena (“determinants”) that influence where a firm should position along the continuum. This however raises challenges. For example, empirical research surprisingly finds many customers belong to an offline-focused segment. This suggests a Vertical strategy linking offline channels. However, today's turbulent retail environment questions whether the offline-focused segment will endure. Should the retailer cater to offline-focused customers or facilitate their progression to “multichannelism”? Another finding is that consumers strongly prefer consistency across channels. This suggests a Horizontal strategy. However, consistency might create channel cannibalization. How can the retailer avoid this? We discuss these and several other findings regarding the impact of the 10 determinants on omnichannel continuum strategy. We identify issues researchers need to research and managers need to consider when developing omnichannel continuum strategy.     

Key Issues in Multichannel Customer Management: Current Knowledge and Future Directions

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.     

Customers’ service-related engagement,experience, and behavioral intent: Moderating role of age

Though customer engagement (CE) and experience are important research priorities, empirically derived insight into these concepts and their associations remains scarce. We therefore investigate the impact of CE on experience and behavioral intent, which we explore in the tourism context. We also envisage customer age to moderate the proposed associations, thereby further contributing to the CE literature. To investigate these issues, we collected data from key tourism-sites in Jammu/Kashmir, Northern India. Using structural equational modeling, we find that CE dimensions exert differential effects on customer experience. The findings also reveal a stronger, significant effect of younger customers' (up to 39) cognitive engagement on experience, whereas a negligible effect is attained for older customers. While the paths from affective/behavioral engagement to experience are significant across all age groups, the association's strength rises with customer age. Moreover, the effect of customer experience on behavioral intention intensifies as customers get older. We conclude by outlining key implications that arise from our analyses, followed by avenues for further research.     

Building Partnerships to Create Social and Economic Value at the Base of the Global Development Pyramid

This paper builds on London and Hart’s critique that Prahalad’s best-selling book prompted a unilateral effort to find a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). Prahalad’s instrumental, firm-centered construction suggests, perhaps unintentionally, a buccaneering style of business enterprise devoted to capturing markets rather than enabling new socially entrepreneurial ventures for those otherwise trapped in conditions of extreme poverty. London and Hart reframe Prahalad’s insight into direct global business enterprise toward “creating a fortune with the base of the pyramid” (p. xi) rather than at the BoP. This shift in language requires a recalibration of strategic focus, we argue, and will necessitate implementation of “moral imagination” to formulate new mental models that can frame the possibility of local entrepreneurs working collaboratively and discursively with development partners drawn from civil society, corporate, and government sectors. Successful partnerships will arise from interactive processes of emergent, co-creative learning within a shared problem domain or “community of practice”. We call attention to three related pluralist framings of situated learning within such communities of practice: (1) decentered stakeholder networks; (2) global action networks; and (3) a focus on “faces and places” as a cognitive lens to humanize and locally situate diverse inhabitants within base of the pyramid partnership projects.     

Customer experience and commitment in retailing: Does customer age matter?

While the customer experience (CX) concept has rapidly gained traction in recent years, its effect on customer brand commitment and loyalty remains tenuous. Moreover, while customer age has been identified as an influential driver of consumer behavior, little is known about its effect on the customer's brand experience. Addressing these gaps, we develop a model that examines the relationships between CX, commitment, and loyalty, while using customer age as a moderator in the proposed associations. A total of 423 valid responses was collected from branded retail customers. Structural equation modeling results reveal a positive effect of (a) CX on customers' affective/calculative commitment, and (b) customer commitment on brand loyalty. Moreover, multi-group analysis results reveal that while customer ages moderates the association between CX/affective commitment, it does not significantly moderate the relationship between CX/calculative commitment. We conclude with key implications that arise from this research.     

The Language of Marketplace Rituals: Implications for Customer Experience Management

The domain of customer experience management (hereafter, CEM) includes every point of customer contact with products, services or businesses (Grewal, Levy, and Kumar 2009). In a recent special issue of the Journal of Retailing, Puccinelli et al. (2009) assert that a key atmospheric element of CEM that can shape customer satisfaction within the retail setting is the “interaction between the customer and employee” (p. 24). In this paper, we delve further into the social-interaction aspects of retail atmospherics, by focusing on how retailers and service providers use language to facilitate a specific type of provider/customer experience that we label the “marketplace ritual.” We use depth interviews and participant observation to: (1) analyze the structure and function of the specific utterances providers identify as salient when creating and executing marketplace rituals; (2) discuss the ways language contributes to perceived strategic CEM-related outcomes; and (3) examine providers’ perceptions of the potentially negative consequences of ritual language for CEM.     

The economics of professional services: lemon markets, credence goods, and C2C information sharing

We discuss how professional service markets are plagued by asymmetric information, by looking jointly at the literature stemming from the seminal work of Akerlof on the “market of lemons”, and at the definition of “credence good” which has been developed especially within the field of health economics. Since consumers cannot evaluate ex post the quality of purchased professional services when these are “credence goods”, they cannot rely with 100 % confidence on other consumers’ and experts’ signals about service providers’ quality. Hence, questions arise on the effectiveness of traditional market features highlighted in literature as market-enhancing when information asymmetry is an issue, namely: advertising, certification, reputation, and liability. Our analysis specifically focuses on consumer-provided knowledge by looking at recent development of Web-based rating and reviewing services. Results point to the fact that consumers in the U.S. heavily rely on such services, and they do so roughly in proportion to their consumption of each professional sector. Therefore, future research on professional services should include a “C2C search technology” when modeling consumer behaviors that allows to define how much each professional service is to be considered as pure or hybrid “credence good.”     

The Effects of Channel Experiences and Direct Marketing on Customer Retention in Multichannel Settings

In customer relationship management (CRM), it is critical for managers to understand how and when customers terminate their relationships with the company in order to make more accurate predictions for CLV. However, in many non-contractual settings, customer churn is not easily observed, which presents difficulty for estimating customer retention. In this research, we present a framework for estimating multichannel customer relationship dynamics in a non-contractual setting that flexibly allows for relationship revival and investigates the effects of different channel experiences and marketing communication on retention and profitability. We use a multi-segment, multivariate hidden Markov modeling framework to model three managerially relevant customer behaviors: purchase amount, purchase incidence, and channel choice. Using data from a multichannel clothing retailer, we uncover two latent relationship states that customers migrate to and from — an active state and an inactive state characterized by different levels of purchase frequency, responsiveness to marketing, and profitability. We find that an offline (retail-store) channel can be used to migrate customers from an inactive state to an active state, effectively serving the purpose of “education” or “revival,” whereas an online channel is most effective in keeping the existing active customers active, thus serving the purpose of “retention”. Using counterfactual analysis, we highlight an opportunity for the multichannel firm to optimize marketing strategies to dynamically manage and increase the retention and hence also the value of its customer base.     

National institutional systems,foreign ownership and firm performance: The case of understudied countries

We analyse the relationship between institutional systems (configurations of countries with similar institutional characteristics) and firm performance. We use a large sample of firms from understudied countries to explore whether the performance impact of these configurations is the same (“equifinality”), whether this holds across different measures of firm performance (“Tversky effect”), and whether some institutional configurations better support foreign-owned firms. We find that it is possible to rank institutional systems according to their impact on firm performance, but the ranking differs according to the performance measure. Although foreign ownership on average confers performance advantages, the magnitude of the impact depends on the configuration. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the importance of institutional similarities across countries, and to the implications of these similarities for the theory of the MNE.     

Creating Relevant Value Through Demand and Supply Integration

Firms that pursue cost leadership strategies tend to focus on operational efficiency but sometimes fail to fully hear the “voice of the customer.” Alternatively, firms pursuing differentiation strategies tend to focus on the customer, but sometimes to the detriment of operational excellence. To help address such imbalances, an emerging stream of supply chain research has introduced the concept of demand and supply integration (DSI). DSI involves coordinating the activities and processes reflective of a firm’s customer focus, with the operational, supply‐side activities that make demand fulfillment possible. This article contributes to this research stream by providing researchable propositions intended to foster support of a new dominant logic in supply chain management thought, describing how firms can best achieve “relevant” customer value by coordinating supply‐ and demand‐focused activities within and across their functional units.     

Building With Bricks and Mortar: The Revenue Impact of Opening Physical Stores in a Multichannel Environment

A crucial decision firms face today is which channels they should make available to customers for transactions. We assess the revenue impact of adding bricks-and-mortar stores to a firm's already existing repertoire of catalog and Internet channels. We decompose the revenue impact into customer acquisition, frequency of orders, returns, and exchanges, and size of orders, returns, and exchanges. We use a multivariate baseline method to assess the impact of adding the physical store channel on these revenue components. As hypothesized, store introduction cannibalizes catalog sales and has much less impact on Internet sales. Also as hypothesized, returns and exchanges increase. Interestingly, transaction sizes of purchases, returns, and exchanges do not change. The “availability effect” produces a net increase in purchase frequency across channels. This more than compensates for increased returns, producing a net increase in revenues of 20% by adding the store channel. Our findings yield a deeper understanding of the revenue relation between channels, and of the dynamic cross-channel effects of marketing actions.     

The Effects of Perceived Fairness on Customer Responses to Retailer SST Push Policies

Many retailers are implementing policies that encourage customer adoption of self-service technology (SST) offerings, such as self-checkout lanes, in order to enhance profitability. Instead of explicitly forcing customers to use SST, retailers create situations in which patrons are subtly pushed toward SST adoption. The authors examine the effects of fairness perceptions of these SST “push” policies on relationships between established antecedents of SST adoption and customer behavioral intentions toward the provider in a retail context. The results suggest fairness perceptions exert a significant influence on the relationships between these antecedents and customer patronage, future spending, and negative word of mouth intentions. Consistent findings across both users and nonusers of SST underscore the importance of fairness perceptions in the context of retailer SST push policies.     

Factors Contributing to Internal Customer Satisfaction and Commitment in Quick Service Restaurants

Abstract

The fast-paced, highly competitive nature of quick service restaurants (QSRs) has motivated members of the industry to develop creative ways to optimize customer satisfaction. This search for competitive advantage has fueled an increased interest in employees as “internal customers” who are primarily responsible for external customer satisfaction. The hospitality industry is unique in that employees are part of the product; they directly provide the service component. This project surveyed over 900 hourly and salaried employees at 61 QSRs. The results indicate strategies and tactics to maintain satisfied and “actively” as well as “passively” committed employees. In turn these employees may be an employer's greatest marketing tool.     

Customer Lifetime Value as the Basis of Customer Segmentation

SUMMARY

In this article, we examine current trends in customer life-time value and customer segmentation models and identify key issues for future research. CLV-based segmentation is a segmentation approach that groups customers into meaningful segments based upon customer lifetime value and (potentially) other factors. In the article, we discuss the extent to which CLV-based segmentation meets the criteria for effective segmentation. We also identify six areas for future research: (1) models and management of “micro-segments,” (2) using CLV-based segmentation to improve the efficiency of marketing programs, (3) the need for more dynamic CLV-based segmentation models, (4) applying CLV-based customer segmentation to new products and new customers, (5) challenges associated with implementing CLV-based segmentation, and (6) the need for new models that enable firms to segment customers by response to marketing activities and CLV at different points in the customer decision process.     

Ethical Customer Value Creation: Drivers and Barriers

There is a long-standing discussion on the positive interactions between enterprise value creation and business competitiveness. The corporate value can be seen as being created from three major sources within the cycle – from employees, from processes, and from customers or investors through reinvestment. To achieve competitive advantages, a firm must create more value than its competitors in the industry. Emphasizing that, firms should explore the positive drivers of customer value creation, allowing for a true value creation that will lead to increments in competitiveness. In reality, however, there are also barriers that hinder customer value creation. Targeting the above issues that have not yet been explored or analyzed, we have collected related literature at the first stage. Based on these presumable assumptions, this paper then conducts an empirical study by surveying and analyzing the relevance given by the investigated leading machinery measuring equipment firms in Taiwan, regarding the concerns as drivers and barriers in relation to customer value creation. This paper especially aims to answer several key questions: What drivers revolving around employees and processes can facilitate the organization to create more value for its customers? Conversely, what barriers block the organization from creating value for customers in examining the same dimensions? Does value creation direct an organization’s profitability and competitiveness? Our questionnaire survey results show that the most recognized and agreed drivers of customer value creation in consideration of employees are “distinctive skills”, “personal experience”, “learning and training”, and “team work”; and, in regard to the firm’s processes, the key drivers are “innovation and evolution”, “R&;D capability”, and “capability for differentiation”. Conversely, the most recognized and agreed barriers to customer value creation in relation to employees are a “distrustful environment” and “inadequate knowledge”; and, in terms of processes, they are “short of core technology”, “poor resource support”, and “bad services and attitudes”. Furthermore, our in-depth interview outcomes reveal that “capital sufficiency” and “mergers and acquisitions” are in practice considered to be other important customer value creation drivers; in contrast, “cultural and structural barriers” and “short of mechanisms to measure customer value creation effectively” are viewed as additional critical barriers to customer value creation.     

Linking Exploration with Exploitation through Relationship Memory*

Companies that are able to help clients make better decisions and enhance their business capabilities to flourish. However, there is often poor rapport between operating personnel who are in touch with end customers and executive personnel who make decisions. Through exploration and exploitation processes, new ideas and actions flow from the individual (i.e., operating personnel) to the organization (i.e., the rest of individuals and groups that form part of the organization). This paper examines the relative importance and significance of “the relationship memory” as a bridge between “exploration” and “exploitation” processes and its effects on the creation of “customer capital” through an empirical investigation of 139 small to medium‐sized enterprises in the Spanish optometry sector using structural equation modeling validated by factor analysis.     

shopper taxonomy for retail strategy development

Segmentation of shoppers has been explored by many academic researchers and business practitioners seeking to understand shopping behaviour or to develop marketing strategies for particular customer groups. Market segmentation holds the key to successful marketing strategy as it encourages understanding of the key variables that differentiate specific segments.

The shopper taxonomy determined through this study is based on a set of variables that is relevant and appropriate for shopper segmentation and reflects the key aspects important to shoppers in motivating shopping behaviour towards a specific retail location. This taxonomy extends the proposed motivational taxonomy of Westbrook and Black (1985), derived from Tauber's (1972) earlier research. Westbrook and Black defined this taxonomy through shopping motives, and identified categories of product-oriented, experiential and a combination of product and experiential shoppers. Their research findings, however, pointed to a six-cluster typology, defining department stone shopping around seven motivations aligned with evaluating options and acquiring the products, engaging in the sales process and gaining stimulation and affiliation through the retail environment.

The “apathetic”, “shopping-processed involved” and “choice optimisation” shopper segments described by Westbrook and Black align with the “have to” “experiential” and “practical” “segments found in this study in terms of their focus on the shopping activity itself and the affiliation and stimulation motives associated with the shopping activity. Other associations between shopper segments across the two studies are less clear, and may be explained through the differing purposes for which the studies were undertaken and resulting variation in the measures used to define the motivational constructs.     

Microsoft: A case in cross‐company transformation

Starting in 2001 with Microsoft corporate headquarters at Redmond, Washington, corporate executives from Microsoft Corporation identified the need for a global tridimensional reorganization to deal with diverse clients and customer needs, business and product lines, and geographical issues and requirements. This reorganization would result in a corporate organizational transformation that was initially designed and implemented at headquarters during fiscal year (FY) 2002. It was then expanded internationally and introduced for international implementation with targeted completion by the end of FY 2003 (June 30, 2003). This case study reviews the background and competitive, customer, and environmental situations that led to this “crosscompany transformation.” It then analyzes the method of the design and implementation process with a primary focus on the interaction of the Europe, Middle East, and Africa Region (EMEA) with Microsoft headquarters. This case study also examines the process, results, and learning experiences of the transformation for FY 2003 through to FY 2004. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Modeling Dependencies in Brand Choice Outcomes Across Complementary Categories

We build an econometric model of a household's contemporaneous brand choice outcomes in complementary product categories. This model explicitly captures cross-category dependencies in brand choice outcomes of a household. Such dependencies have not been modeled in existing multi-category demand models.Our model accommodates cross-category dependencies that arise on account of three component effects: (1) complementarity due to the additional utility that a household derives from the joint purchase of brands in complementary categories, (2) marketing spillovers due to the effects of brands’ prices in one category affecting the households’ latent utilities for brands in the complementary category, (3) unobserved dependencies due to correlations in households’ latent utilities for brands across categories.We estimate our proposed multi-category brand choice model using scanner panel data on cake mix and frosting categories. We find that complementarity accounts for the vast majority of the estimated cross-category effects in demand. We also find that as much as 55 percent of the total retail profit impact of price promotions arise on account of brand-level (focus of our study), as opposed to category-level (focus of previous studies), dependencies in household demand. Finally, we propose an easily interpretable visual representation – Largess and Free-Ride Plot – of cross-category price elasticities that summarizes the differential abilities of brands to influence, or be influenced by, brands in the complementary category.     

Challenges and opportunities in high-dimensional choice data analyses

Modern businesses routinely capture data on millions of observations across subjects, brand SKUs, time periods, predictor variables, and store locations, thereby generating massive high-dimensional datasets. For example, Netflix has choice data on billions of movies selected, user ratings, and geodemographic characteristics. Similar datasets emerge in retailing with potential use of RFIDs, online auctions (e.g., eBay), social networking sites (e.g., mySpace), product reviews (e.g., ePinion), customer relationship marketing, internet commerce, and mobile marketing. We envision massive databases as four-way VAST matrix arrays of Variables?×?Alternatives?×?Subjects?×?Time where at least one dimension is very large. Predictive choice modeling of such massive databases poses novel computational and modeling issues, and the negligence of academic research to address them will result in a disconnect from the marketing practice and an impoverishment of marketing theory. To address these issues, we discuss and identify the challenges and opportunities for both practicing and academic marketers. Thus, we offer an impetus for advancing research in this nascent area and fostering collaboration across scientific disciplines to improve the practice of marketing in information-rich environment.