Understanding Consumer Behavior in the Hyper-Connected Omnichannel Retailing

Introduction

Technology transformed retailing and interactions between retailers and consumers in the last two decades. New technologies changed how consumers look for information, evaluate products and services, make purchase decisions, and share their experiences in an interactive way along their consumption journey. The actual shopping environment is not limited to independent retail channels, the lines between different channels has been eliminated in order to provide a seamless consumption experience (Rigby, 2011). Connected customers can interact with offline stores, online stores and other customers with the support of the new technologies (Inman & Nikolova, 2017). Digital, physical, human touchpoints are available for customers who need more information, evaluate service/product offerings, purchase the offerings and request post-purchase support, (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016; Quach et al., 2020). In this hyper-connected environment, the main objective is to offer a consistent and seamless customer experience throughout different retailing channels (Chang & Li,2022). With the emphasis on the consistency and integration among various channels, omni-channel retailing, described by Beck & Rygl (2015) as different activities to sell products or services through all extensive channels supported by full integration, shares common points with omni-channel marketing which is a rather new concept (Nguyen et al., 2022).

Meanwhile, based on conventional marketing management perspective, omni-channel retailing can be assumed as a subset of omni-channel marketing, which can have a larger scope in terms of research and applications (Nguyen et al., 2022). Berman & Thelen (2018) describes omni-channel marketing as the fully integrated and progressed version of multichannel and cross-channel marketing and it includes customer shopping histories across channels, requires more promotions, prices and special customer loyalty program across channels. With a more inclusive approach, omni-channel marketing can be described as “the synergistic management of all customer touchpoints and channels both internal and external to the firm to ensure that the customer experience across channels as well as firm-side marketing activity, including marketing mix and marketing communication (owned, paid and earned), is optimized for both firms and their customers” (Cui et al., 2021, p.104). The scope of omni-channel marketing is expanding with different combinations of customer behaviors throughout their customer journey and different services such as e-government services (Schenk et al., 2021). Governments, producers in different industries (e.g. packaged goods, fashion), service providers (e.g. banks, restaurants) are actively implementing omni-channel marketing plans (Berman & Thelen, 2018; Cui et al., 2021).