Relational Proximity With Customers in the Retail Industry

This chapter uses a theoretical background to identify and explain a new proximity concept in retail sector. In particular, adopting a marketing and management approach, an innovative type of “proximity” is presented, explaining a set of numerous elements and relationships that could link retailer, customer, and territory: “the relational proximity.” The factors useful to describe the roots of “relational proximity” between retailer and customer are presented and identified in a specific case study. The new concept of relational proximity represents the originality of this study. It explains the mood coming out from the integration between the retail value offering and its contextualization with environment, society, and contemporaneity. Following this logic, the retailers in the future will focus their competitive advantage working with the customers, building day by day their relational proximity.

The University in a Retail Context

On-campus retailing is a spread practice, but academia has almost underestimated its potential. Nevertheless, not every type of retail activity adds value to customers and society. When the proposed value is society-driven and sensitive to consumers' wellbeing, customers' engagement increases. One business model, through which it is possible to exploit the benefits of on-campus retailing by adding social value, is the Yunus Social Business. This is a case-based study aiming to describe, through the Social Business Model Canvas, the founding of an organic shop within a university that is supplied by administrative staff of the university that are at the same time also local farmers. Further, the shop aims to resell organic food to university staff and students. The case study is theoretically enriched by traditional Porterian frameworks and new service frameworks such as the service-dominant logic by emphasizing the role of value proposition, value co-creation, and value-in-context.

Conceptualization and Measurement of Smart Shopping

The purpose of this chapter is to critically review current studies on “smart shopping” with the aim of improving the understanding of this phenomenon and suggesting future lines of research. The authors present a pioneering classification of international research on smart shopping published in the last 30 years that provides a comprehensive overview of existing knowledge. They categorize smart shoppers' traits and develop a thorough analysis of existing measurement scales, data collection methods, product categories and countries that have been objects of prior studies. Their findings highlight the need to develop cross-cultural models that consider the affective and behavioral dimensions of smart shoppers from different countries to help academics and practitioners better identify and target this customer segment.

Strengths of Online Travel Agencies From the Perspective of the Digital Tourist

Recent tourism literature reviews the movement of the current distribution landscape toward disintermediation as the Internet and mobile technologies provide consumers with more and more tools for researching suppliers/providers and purchasing products and services directly. This calls into question the necessity and role of retailers in the industry. Focusing on online travel agencies (OTAs), this chapter is aimed at solving three main research questions: What is the current position of online tourism retailers as indirect channels in the online tourism distribution system? What are the strengths of OTAs as seen by their customers? and How should OTAs face the future? A database drawn from a survey of Spanish digital tourists is used to illustrate the initial theoretical discussion and concluding remarks.

Effect of E-Retail Product Category on Performance

Literature on product categorization of e-retail products has adopted a consumer view and studied the direct effect on consumer-level variables such as purchase intent or customer satisfaction. In doing so, the moderating effect of product categorization of e-retail products on firm-level variables has been ignored. To address the implications of e-retail product categorization, this chapter asks the following question, What is the moderating effect of e-retail product category on sales performance? This chapter uses concepts of information economics, e-retailing, and the search-experience-credence (SEC) categorization of products to develop theoretical hypotheses. Using data from 500 US e-retailers, this chapter contends that the ease to evaluate retail products online has a positive effect on sales volume of e-retail firms. This effect is the result of increased web traffic and decreased conversion rates, which describes the e-retail market behavior with firm-level variables.

The Influence of Retailer Choices on Consumer Behaviors and Sales Productivity

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the most relevant factors affecting retailers by investigating the relationships between store type, assortment level, customers' purchases, and sales productivity. Analyzing the dataset of the German retailer Rossmann through classification and regression tools, this work investigates what store type customers visit more often, what kind of assortment they prefer, and how sales profitability is affected by internal and external factors. Results show a tendency from customers to shop in smaller neighborhood markets rather than in the large shopping centers with extensive assortments, determining an increase in sales productivity in smaller size stores. Results suggest managers developing strategies for creating multiple retail formats in order to meet the diverse customers' tendencies in the today's market.

Understanding Fluency and Friction in Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management is a relatively new research field. Although past literature has studied certain aspects and elements of customer experience, major questions are still unanswered, including how to integrate touch-points across the customer journey and how to measure customer experience in a way that takes its multidimensional nature into consideration. This chapter attempts to provide a framework to study how customers perceive touch-points as a holistic experience and proposes an integrated approach to measuring the experience of challenges that result in what we call “friction.” The framework is based on the concept of “fluency” from the engineering and omni-channel literature and suggests survey items which can be used for future empirical studies. Insights from this research can be used by various types of organizations to better identify problems in the customer experience in regard to the process and dynamics of touch-points through time and across channels/platforms, thereby enhancing value for customers and businesses.

Retail Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is one of the most debated topics in marketing literature. The great interest of the scientific community resulted in a large amount of research on this topic making it difficult for scholars to understand how to really contribute to advance the research. Based on these considerations, this chapter aims to provide an overview of the research findings and trends of previous studies to guide the researcher to the most influential works, results, and issues that need more insights. In particular, this chapter offers a literature review on customer engagement and retail customer engagement using bibliometric analysis and scientific mapping study. Results show the most productive authors, most cited publications, most frequent words, and clusters of related words. The analysis provides a description of the state of the art of retail customer engagement and suggests future research directions.

How Smartness Enables Value Co-Creation

Digital revolution has involved and changed many service industries and also retailing, renewing its inbound and outbound processes. The pervasiveness of the internet of things has boosted the rise and growth of digital platforms, exploiting consumers' potential in personalizing their shopping experience, according to their wants and needs. Digital platforms have triggered the transition from a traditional two-sided marketplace towards a dynamic and complex one. The smart mindset, which has pervaded retail service domain, is in line with the current service research, according to which the dematerialization of value exchanges implies a new approach to the traditional service delivery. Therefore, this chapter aims at investigating the way retailers manage digital tools. Embracing the framework of S-D logic, the analysis shapes the role that the digital technologies have in digital process reconfiguration as well as in the shaping of specific context or platform able to boost the emergence of retail service innovation. A multiple case study has been performed.

Engagement in a Third-Party-Managed Virtual Community and Its Effect on Customer Identification

The chapter analyzes the components that generate users' engagement in a third-party-managed virtual community and these components' contribution to building user identification with the community. When this chapter distinguish between users who share their comments in multiple service categories to users who share comments in only one or two service categories, it is found that enjoyment benefits and participation in co-innovation increase identification with the community for both groups. The two groups differ, however, in that learning benefits improve identification with the community for participants who share comments on three or more services but not for participants who share comments on fewer services. The latter group's identification is, however, influenced by social benefits, functional benefits, and advocacy, feedback, and help to others.