Arousal and Merriment as Decision Drivers among Young Consumers

Arousal among young consumers plays a key role in buying decisions. One of the challenges for success in retailing is to enhance the in-store ambience to influence the young consumers for prolonged stay in the store for shopping and explore the zone of experience of new products. This paper attempts to analyze arousal and satisfaction as behavioral drivers which influence buying behavior of young consumers and measures the extent of satisfaction on purchases made through empirical investigation in Mexico. Discussions in the study are also focused on the role of in-store recreation, ambience and point of sales strategies in influencing buying behavior of young consumers.Shopping behavior, store ambience, arousal, point of sales strategy, customer value, buying decision, leisure shopping, product experience, retailing, referrals

COMMENTARY Enhancing consumer empowerment

Purpose of this paper: Much of the literature on consumer empowerment focuses on consumers’ efforts to regain control of their consumption processes from suppliers. Our purpose is to argue that many suppliers achieve success by trying hard to empower consumers. The mechanism by which this takes place consists of researching and providing what consumers want. Consumers feel empowered when they are able to enjoy the consumption process. This is of particular note in shopping, which is not simply obtaining products but also experience and enjoyment. Design/methodology/approach: Research is examined into the links between firms’ efforts to understand what consumers want, atmospheric stimuli, emotions and buying behaviour. Findings: We find that successful firms’ try hard to understand what consumers want and to improve consumer satisfaction and empowerment by providing pleasant marketing environments and apt, relevant information. Research limitations/implications: The approach is based on prior literature. We examine marketing to consumers in company locations, e.g. stores, malls, restaurants and banks to examine specific evidence of the effects of atmospheric stimuli such as aroma, music and video screen media. Practical implications: We contend that firms can and do become successful in a competitive arena by providing pleasant environments and information that people want. What is original/value of paper?: We show how consumer empowerment is an important concept. This paper contributes since there is a dearth of writings specifically about consumer empowerment in the marketing literature. Far from the popular view of consumers being manipulated by firms, successful firms try hard to and succeed in empowering consumers in their marketing activities

Digital marketing performance measurement: how good marketing performance measurement practices can increase firm's performance

The main purpose of this case study is to analyse the impact of good marketing performance practices on firm’s results, by using financial metrics. With digital improvement, it has become easier to measure marketing efforts. Hence, this project is focused on Forall Phones’ digital marketing performance measurement process, on how performance indicators are chosen, communicated and used to lead to strategic decisions, and if this department is creating value for the company. The measurement process used is one of the firm’s competitive advantages, with a constant monitoring of the trade-off between costs and benefits, in order to provide a clear vision of what is most profitable for the department. There is a clear focus on what is highly quantifiable and measurable and the establishment of objectives and target audiences, and their constant monitoring, allowing a more effective way of channelling efforts in this direction. Despite the high investment in marketing and, since the professionalization of the department, the considerable increase of the results at the level of sales and revenue, there is not enough data to clearly highlight it from the rest. One possible justification is that the department does not make a forecast of ROI with its respective monitoring, which would allow knowing all the profitability of the marketing, as well as perceive gaps and its causes, which would provide a more effective budget management, through a better resources’ allocation.O presente caso de estudo tem como principal propósito analisar o impacto de boas práticas de medição da performance do marketing nos resultados da empresa, usando métricas financeiras. Com o avanço do digital, tornou-se mais fácil medir os esforços de marketing. Assim, este projeto está focado no processo de medição de performance de marketing digital da Forall Phones, na maneira como os indicadores de performance são escolhidos, comunicados e usados para tomar decisões estratégicas, e se o departamento de marketing está ou não a criar valor para a empresa. O processo de medição usado tem sido uma das vantagens competitivas da empresa, havendo uma constante monitorização de custos relativamente aos benefícios, de modo a proporcionar uma leitura clara do que é mais rentável para o departamento. Existe um foco claro nas métricas altamente quantificáveis e mensuráveis e o estabelecimento de objetivos e de públicos-alvo, e sua monitorização, permite um foco mais claro daquilo que se pretende, canalizando os esforços nesse sentido. Apesar do elevado investimento em marketing e de, desde a profissionalização do departamento, os resultados ao nível de vendas e receita terem aumentado consideravelmente, não existem dados suficientes para o destacar, claramente, dos restantes. Uma possível justificação é o facto de o departamento não fazer uma previsão de ROI com uma monitorização do mesmo, o que permitiria saber toda a rentabilidade do marketing, bem como perceber desvios e causas dos mesmos, proporcionando uma gestão do budget mais eficaz, através de uma melhor alocação de recursos

Leisure Shopping Behavior and Recreational Retailing:A Symbiotic Analysis of Marketplace Strategy and Consumer Response

Consumers often benefit from increased competition in differentiated product settings during leisure shopping season. The wide choice, atmosphere, convenience, sales people, refreshments, location, promotional activities and merchandising policy are associated during the leisure shopping. The consumer shopping behavior during leisure is largely driven by the recreational infrastructure as a competitive strategy of retailers. This also helps developing store loyalty, innovative concern and the high perceived customer values whereby individuals experience enjoyment from shopping. This paper aims to analyze through an empirical investigation in Mexico, drivers which influence consumers’ leisure shopping behavior and measure customer value in terms of levels of satisfaction. The study also focuses on the role of in-store recreational infrastructure and retail selling strategies in swaying the leisure shopping and driving store loyalty.Recreational retailing, shopping behavior, store loyalty, customer value, production attractiveness, brand variability

Expanding market strategies for logon

This company project provides an analysis and evaluation of market expansion possibilities of the German company LogOn. The company offers an innovative and intuitive online matching technology originally designed for online recruiting in the field of human resources. Innovation plays an increasingly important role to be competitive in times of globalization, both in small businesses and general economic growth. Current success with the matching technology raises expansion plans into the area digital advertisement, focusing on an increasingly dramatic situation: on one hand digital advertising spend is constantly growing in Western Europe. On the other hand dissatisfaction with digital advertisement, by reason of low quality and clutter is simultaneously increasing. As a matter of fact advertising is getting less effective. Linking the current situation of digital advertising with the concept of Innovation Management, a new challenge and market expansion into digital advertisement appears possible: can LogOn’s online matching technology expands into the field of digital and media advertising in order to create added value? Following the framework of Innovation Process, the idea generation process delivers a concrete product idea. The matching technology is able to intuitively create a profile of a user. It looks at the motivation of information, estimates possible consequences and generates additional information intuitively. The matching technology serves as an intelligent spam filter, which is able to exclude irrelevant content from a user’s mobile or desktop device. The technology offers a better customer experience and increases customer satisfaction. This benefit can be used in the B2C and B2B sector by offering users a more enjoyable advertisement experience and adding value by making advertisement more effective and successful in general. LogOn´s matching technology has three target groups: users, publisher and vendors

Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation

Essays on Retail Store Delivery System Design Strategies

This research develops and empirically tests multiple theory-based models of retail store design strategies. Specifically, we examine the impact that different `bricks and mortar\u27 (store channel) service delivery system design strategies have on merchandise retailer effectiveness; which we measure in terms of satisfaction, operating, and financial performance. We draw our theory from a multidisciplinary literature base in the areas of organizational design, service marketing and operations strategy, retail management, and analyses of capital markets. The aim is to provide insights for advancing service operations research and to offer retail store managers and designers a method to weigh the tradeoffs associated with specific store design choices. In particular, retailers can test the effectiveness of their store design strategies using these performance models. Towards this end, three essays are developed to address gaps in the extant service operations and marketing literatures with respect to the evaluation of retail store design strategies that focus on customer service encounters and environmental changes. We use a combination of empirical methods, including survey and dynamic panel data analysis techniques, to address the several important issues. First, we conduct a field survey of 175 store managers in the Southeast U.S. to develop and empirically validate multi-item measures of important retail store design factors that can be used by retail store managers to monitor the alignment of the service concept intent to actual store operating design strategies. In the second essay, we construct a retail store design strategy model to show the structural links among store operating complexity factors, customer information requirements, store encounter design choices, and customer satisfaction. We find that the store\u27s perception of customer service encounter information requirements is the primary motivator of customer encounter store design choice - particularly how much stores will use design for customer self-selection or will give task empowerment to front-line store employees. We establish an important link between high customer information requirements and the need to use more front-line employee empowerment to enhance both employee and customer satisfaction. Finally, the third essay applies panel data collected from retail company 10-K reports and the Compustat financial database, to examine retailer store system design responses to product line margin shifts over time. We operationalize measures of store system `design responsiveness\u27 to evaluate retail firm design performance. Using econometric modeling and dynamic panel analysis techniques, we find that aligning store capital with product margin shifts over time is critical to grow firm profits. Moreover, we find that not aligning store labor requirements with product margins tends to quickly diminish retail firm performance. While the financial benefits of being design responsive are seen only in the short-term, there may also be positive carryover effects of being responsive on forward customer satisfaction scores. Collectively, these essays argue for the importance of aligning store design strategy decisions with retail-specific operational complexity factors to promote the long-term sustainability and survival of retail service firms

Marketing images and consumers' experiences in selling environments

In a well-functioning market, consumers exert choices not just in purchases of products but also in selections of locations to enjoy shopping. Scholarly research has demonstrated that retail atmospheres impact on shoppers’ pleasurable shopping experiences. Demonstrating the marketing concept in action, shoppers consistently respond to this empowerment by for example, spending more time shopping and spending more money in retail facilities that are perceived to offer a pleasanter atmosphere and experience. This research pivots round an in-depth qualitative study that evaluated the impact of a plasma screens and specific informational content on shopping centre user behaviour. A phenomenological study of the effects of the medium, and the way in which these systems influence behaviour, permitted a far deeper investigation of our sample group vis-àvis increased browsing time and the propensity to spend. A series of eight focus discussions were conducted with local user groups of varying age and gender. Key themes drawn from the group discussions using axial coding indicated that the influence created by the images varied with subjects and settings. The general consensus was that such ‘screens’ created a certain ambience that influenced the way our subjects felt about the selling environment under study. Moreover, for our sample groups, there was clearly a link between the screened images and modern expectations of a selling environment. The plasma screens provided added enjoyment to shoppers’ experiences, providing them with more information enabling more informed shopping choices. The research concludes with implications for strategic marketing, theory and practice

How Marketing Factors Influence Online Browsing and Sales: Evidence From China's E-Commerce Market

As the e-commerce market evolves from being primarily transactional to being more subtle, sellers now seek to form online strategies. Previous studies have investigated buyers’ purchasing patterns, online transaction trust, electronic word-of-mouth, online resale behavior as well as online auctions. However, less is known about the antecedents that effect store traffic and sales. By using real market data from a major Chinese C2C e-commerce site, this article investigates C2C transactional formation and identifies sellers’ performance payoffs that result from various marketing factors. Marketing factors that influence store traffic and sales will be analyzed by means of the Negative Binomial model and Tobit model. Results point out that strong store reputation and high service quality are crucial indicators for increasing number of browsers and sales amount. In accordance with the results of prior research, advertising is confirmed as an effective tool for positively influencing both store traffic and sales. In addition, we found that guarantee policies can positively impact store sales only by interacting with reputation ratings. Drawing on empirical findings, we also discuss the managerial implications for C2C sellers and put forth some recommendations

Retail positioning through customer satisfaction: an alternative explanation to the resource-based view

Through exploring factors influencing effective retail positioning strategies in an emerging market environment, this paper challenges the role of isolation mechanism and heterogeneous idiosyncrasy argued by the resource-based view theory. By drawing on a sample of 11,577 customers from hypermarkets, electronic appliance specialty stores and department stores in major Chinese cities, we set up ten hypotheses and confirm a nine-item model for customeroriented retail positioning (perceived price, store image, product, shopping environment, customer service, payment process, after-sales service, store policies, and shopping convenience). Our results show that different retail formats achieve success through the implementation of similar positioning strategies, in which case, it is not heterogeneity but homogeneity that contributes to retailers' success greatly at the development stage of retail expansion. Our results challenge previously proved effectiveness of inimitability to success by the resource-based view, and support homogenous idiosyncrasy of retailers in the implementation of customer-oriented positioning strategies in an emerging market