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Top2. The Adoption Of New Channel
Direct marketing retailers have traditionally mailed catalogues and provided consumers with order channels such as mail order and call center (David Sheppard Associates, Lin et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019, Cheng et al, 2019; Xiao & Li, 2019). With the advent of the Internet channel, the direct marketing retailers have reported a ‘channel shift’ toward Internet-based orders (Rhee, 2010; Raguseo, 2018; Wollenburg et al., 2018). They have also perceived that maintaining a call center would be much costlier than the Internet channel, and encouraged their customers to use the Internet order channel (Rhee, 2010; Medichie, 2011; Beheshtian-Ardakani et al., 2018). Some scholars have thought that the Internet channel would dominate the direct marketing purchases owing to its availability, convenience and information source. However, we have observed over a decade of Internet usage that the Internet channel never eliminated the other channels in direct marketing (Rhee, 2010; Kim & Kumar, 2018).
Other marketing studies investigate the contribution of channel to the firm’s revenue and loyalty. Kumar & Venkatesan (2005) have showed that customers who shop across multiple channels provide higher revenues and higher share of wallet and are more active than those who shop through one channel. However, their study does not investigate the channel usage behavior that will make the customer a multi-channel shopper. Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy (2003) have found that loyalty to a service provider is higher when it is chosen online versus offline.
Also, some other studies explore channel cannibalization. Biyalogorsky & Naik (2003) have found that online sales do not significantly cannibalize retail sales and that the firm’s online activities build long-term online equity. Dleersnyder, Inge, Gielens, & Dekimpe, (2002) have stated there is little evidence that the introduction of a newspaper website cannibalizes circulation of the print version. However, these studies do not consider under what conditions the Internet channel will not cannibalize the sales of other channels (Rhee, 2010).