Three Essays on New Challenges and Opportunities for Marketing in an Evolving Technological Environment
Ongoing advancements in technology have significantly shaped the marketing landscape over the course of the last decades. Consequently, new technology-driven opportunities and challenges for marketing research and practice emerge. Those urge the need to redefine firm-based value propositions, to adapt business models, to place significant emphasis on topics such as innovation, design and strategy, but also to develop new knowledge and skill sets. In response to those changes, this dissertation addresses two major developments and related opportunities and challenges – namely, digitized retail environments and innovative, complex business models – in three different essays. Thereby, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of the evolving relationship between marketing and technology. Essay 1 and Essay 2 address the increasing digitization of physical retail environments. Retailers embrace a plethora of retail technologies to facilitate activities and processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to consumers and to consequently improving physical retail stores. Essay 1 provides an integrated literature review on digital retail technologies’ impact on consumer behavior at physical retail stores. Thereby, Essay 1 adopts a shopping cycle based framework structured around distinct phases of consumer behavior to delineate and summarize findings from existing literature on the behavioral effects of retail technologies embraced by retailers. With the applied shopping cycle based framework, Essay 1 identifies specific gaps in extant literature relative to currently embraced practices of retail technology, but furthermore on emerging trends, which have the potential to reshape the retailing environment. Subsequently, an extensive research agenda is proposed to advance the next generation of knowledge development. With its integrated literature review and research agenda, Essay 1 contributes to research in the retail area, such as research on customer experience, shopper marketing and specifically on the role of technology in retailing. Essay 2 analyzes consumers’ response to one particular innovative retail technology and thus replies to future questions of the research agenda developed in Essay 1. Essay 2 analyzes the perceptions and consequences of attribute-based personalized advertising in physical retail stores, where other people are present and can see the personalized content. Essay 2 shows when and how social presence of others impacts consumers’ attitudes and behavioral intentions, as well as emotions, when exposed to personalized advertising. The findings of two experimental studies provide evidence, that the presence of others does not influence consumer response per se, but it interacts with personalization. Further, the results show that consumers’ negative response to personalized ads in the social presence of others is mediated by embarrassment and moderated by consumers’ congruity state (the extent to which the ad is consistent with the consumer’s self-concept). These findings offer new theoretical insights into how consumers respond to personalized advertising in the social presence of others, and thus advance marketing research on personalized advertising, digital displays, shopper marketing as well as research on customer experience. Further, the results disclose meaningful managerial implications for the application of new consumer tracking technology. Essay 3 addresses opportunities and challenges related to innovative, complex business models resulting from technological advancements. With customer orientation in free e-services, Essay 3 analyzes a strategically highly relevant phenomenon, which thus far has been neglected by prior research. Free e-services are characterized by the superiority of free costumers and interdependencies between free and paying customers. Essay 3 investigates how free e-service providers respond to those particularities in their customer orientation activities. Results from one qualitative and one quantitative study uncover, that only free-born providers, that from the outset strategically committed themselves to the free business model, possess customer orientation capabilities that match the particularities of free e-services. They use customer orientation toward one customer group to increase the satisfaction of the other simultaneously and, thus, are reaching their financial goals. Contrastively, laggards, that started with a non-free business model before launching their free e-service, do not exploit the full potential of customer orientation, as they focus too much on the paying customer group. These findings offer new theoretical insights for research on customer orientation, research on two-sided markets as well as on stakeholder marketing. Moreover, Essay 3 provides valuable and actionable insights for managers of free e-services. Taking a broader perspective, this dissertation advances marketing knowledge on technological innovation, new types of consumer data, strategy shifts, as well as new firm capabilities and managerial skill sets required in an age of disruption within the virtual, but also the physical world. By using a variety of methods including conceptual work, experiments, qualitative interviews as well as survey research, and furthermore by ensuring high practical relevance, this dissertation adds important perspectives to the evolving relationship between marketing and technology.
Digitalization, Retail Technologies, Opportunities and Challenges, Free E-Services
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