Journal of Retailing最新文献

Retailers rely on virtual assistants (VAs), such as Amazon's Alexa and chatbots, to deliver 24/7 customer service at low costs, as well as novel shopping opportunities. Despite improved VA capabilities due to artificial intelligence (AI), many retailers still struggle to convince customers to become repeat users of VAs. Therefore, to establish recommendations for how to facilitate VA use, this meta-analysis extracts 2,766 correlations from 244 independent samples of customers interacting with VAs. The results suggest that customer-, VA-, and shopping occasion–related factors all influence technology use. Price value is the strongest driver, followed by support, social influence, and anthropomorphism. Performance risk, competence, and trust matter to lesser extents. These factors exert strong indirect effects by triggering two customer responses: cognitive and emotional. Negative emotions emerge as a particularly important mediator. Finally, several VA types enhance or weaken the noted effects, including whether they are intelligent/less intelligent, commercial/noncommercial, voice-/text-based, and avatar-/non-avatar-based. The results suggest no one-size-fits-all approach applies for VAs, because their performance varies across customer responses. The current meta-analysis provides in-depth guidance for retailers seeking to select appealing VAs.

Companies are increasingly expected to contribute, above and beyond a profit motive, to society. Leaders across industries have addressed the expectation by engaging in activism. While some upper echelons leaders initiate activism efforts in a way that strengthens their firms, others are struggling to do so without risking brand and business performance. This research addresses this important managerial challenge by conceptualizing activism through a risk paradigm. To do this, we first introduce and define a construct called Enterprise Activism. The construct comprises all forms of firm-initiated activism which can impact brand and business performance, such as brand activism, CEO activism, and corporate activism, regardless of who is making the decision (e.g., Chief Marketing Officer or store manager) or whether a portfolio brand or the corporate brand is involved (e.g., Harris Teeter or the corporate brand, Kroger). We then conceptualize the Enterprise Activism Risk Model, providing insight into how different types of actions can pose market share and positional advantage risks. Leveraging insight from C-level leaders, we identify ways that firm leaders can deploy the model to advance business practice. Finally, we provide a research agenda to develop new theory and evidence to help support and improve practice. The new insight provided herein provides a framework that can enable upper echelons leaders to evaluate, discuss, and navigate activism to minimize business risk.

Online retailing is still dominated by information asymmetries, as it often remains difficult for consumers to fully judge the quality of a product online. Reviews written by customers help to reduce this asymmetry. Helpful reviews have thus become an important tool to drive online sales. Beside textual information, reviews nowadays also often include images that can further help consumers to better judge products or services. While online retailers need to invest substantial resources in hosting and incentivizing review images, it remains unclear under which conditions review images drive (or reduce) review helpfulness and how review image content affects review helpfulness. We rely on a set of more than 97,000 reviews from Amazon to investigate the contingencies under which review images increase review helpfulness. Furthermore, we rely on more than 6,000 images in our data set to explore how review image content (i.e., image focus and context fit) drives review helpfulness. Our results show that online retailers should especially motivate consumers to include images in a review when the overall rating is extremely positive, when the reviewer has a high reputation, and when the review addresses a hedonic or experience product. Our image content analysis further shows that images help to increase helpfulness when they show the product in application. This effect is especially strong in the case of longer reviews.

Improving the healthiness of diets can be realized by replacing unhealthy with healthier product alternatives when shopping for groceries. For this strategy to be effective, shoppers need to consistently make healthier choices. However, shoppers may end up balancing the healthiness of their choices throughout the shopping trip, (partly) offsetting the benefits of a healthy product choice (e.g., low-fat milk) by an unhealthy subsequent choice (e.g., sugary cornflakes). Across two studies, one study with purchase data from a brick-and-mortar supermarket and one online experimental study, we empirically demonstrate that the relative healthiness of an initial product choice is indeed inversely related to the relative healthiness of the subsequent choice, regardless of the category of both products. That means: a relatively healthy choice is followed by a relatively unhealthier choice, and vice versa. Furthermore, the strength of this balancing effect differs depending on the nature of the product category; the dynamic effect is less pronounced when subsequently choosing within a vice (vs. virtue) product category. In the brick-and-mortar supermarket, the dynamics also become less pronounced as the shopping trip progresses. These findings contribute to literature on in-store decision-making and within-trip dynamics, and underscore the need for retailers to have a thorough understanding of these healthy shopping dynamics in order to effectively promote healthier baskets in support of the growing demand for healthy diets.

This research examines online product reviewers and their influence on consumers who read and endorse those posted reviews. We examine three primary research questions. First, what kinds of products will reviewers review, and how do these choices influence consumers’ endorsements (i.e., user votes) of the reviews? Second, how does the volume of reviews that a reviewer writes affect consumers’ perceptions of how helpful the reviews are? Third, if reviewers are more positive (or critical), does that influence consumers’ endorsements? This research examines not only the static effects of these multifaceted relationships but also the dynamic changes in the effect magnitudes over time. Using the time-varying effect model (TVEM) with 11 years of Yelp review data, we find that a reviewer's influence on consumers tends to increase over time as the reviewer accumulates more experience in their review writing activities. However, we find two exceptions in the monotonically increasing pattern with Product Satisfaction and Reviewer Rating Positivity, demonstrating U-shaped and inverted ∩-shaped impacts over time, respectively. We explain such results with the “expertise trap” phenomenon. Thus, our research offers new insights to platform managers and product managers in governing influential reviewers.

Eye-tracking offers many insights into shopping cognition by capturing proxies to attention patterns, visual processing, and decision sequences. While lab experiments using simulated shopping tasks are becoming more common in retailing research, field research using eye-tracking technology remains scarce despite higher ecological validity. This paper advocates expanding eye-tracking adoption into brick-and-mortar contexts and provides guidelines for researchers interested in conducting such retailing research. The authors discuss different data types that can be used to understand in-store shopping behaviours and argue why eye-tracking offers a compelling opportunity to decode consumer decisions in real-world complexity. Next, they review current literature, highlighting good examples of existing field studies and areas of opportunities for new research. Finally, the authors provide stepwise best-practice guidelines for executing impactful, triangulated field research across the retail landscape using eye-tracking. The paper presents a call to action for expanding eye-tracking research beyond the lab and into real-world retail aisles.