Content is King? The Effectiveness of Message Content, Personalization, and Location in Mobile In-Store Advertising

Smartphones have become a vital part of our lives, a personal assistant helping us as customers mastering everyday tasks. For example, the new stationary supermarket Amazon Go implements customers’ smartphones as an integral part for completing the grocery shopping process (e.g. used to check-in, for payment). As in-store communication over smartphones becomes increasingly important, retailers pay their attention to mobile in-store advertising, which offers them new perspectives to interact with customers at the point of sale. In this study, we therefore investigate the effectiveness of mobile in-store advertising by empirically examining which combination of message content is most effective for different in-store locations. Drawing on Construal Level Theory, we conduct an online choice experiment, using a simulated supermarket shopping task. Results show that personalization in combination with price promotions are most effective regarding the choice of the target product when spatially close to the product. Moreover, personalization strengthens the impact of ad content at the shelf, representing an amplifying effect on product choice

Antecedents of Webrooming in Omnichannel Retailing

Although webrooming has become common practice in omnichannel consumer behavior, only a few empirical studies have managed to shed light on the phenomenon. With this research work, we aim to investigate important antecedents of webrooming. We base our conceptual framework on anticipated utility theory and expect that customers' anticipated utility from using the physical store versus the online store for purchase can be predicted by four groups of antecedents: psychographic variables, shopping motivations, channel-related variables, and product-related variables. With the help of a data set from a large cross-national online survey in which 1497 customers reconstruct their last purchase journey, we differentiate webroomers from pure online shoppers. In addition, we disentangle customers who used retailer-owned, competitor-owned, and independent touchpoints along the search and purchase phase of the customer journey in order to characterize webroomers in an omnichannel context and assess their prevalence in different countries and industries. Our insights on the characteristics and antecedents of webrooming help retailers to detect and better understand the psychology behind the webrooming phenomenon from a consumer perspective in an omnichannel retailing environment. In addition, results from our exploratory analysis on the positive association between webrooming and customer spending contribute to research and practice by providing first evidence on the economic value of webrooming

The Effects of Personalized Recommendations with Popularity Information on Sales - A Field Study in Grocery Retailing

In consumer and information systems research, it remains unclear how consumers consider smartphone app recommendations in the course of their decision making process that leads to product choices in the physical store. Moreover, it is unclear which type of information smartphone apps should transport to consumers and if there are any customer segmentation criteria for smartphone app design. With respect to the theoretical and managerial importance of recommendation services in the form of smartphone apps we want to shed some light on this topic. Combining literature from the fields of IS and marketing research, we hypothesize that personalized recommendations via smartphone apps can help to boost sales in physical grocery stores. Furthermore, we hypothesize that additional popularity information (in the form of “stars”) does not amplify the positive effect of personalized recommendations. In addition, we assume that the effects of recommendation usage differ for men and women. We conducted a field study with a European grocery retailer to test our hypotheses. Finally, we discuss first implications as well as central limitations of our research and present the next research steps