With four years of experience as a strategic consultant for small and medium sized business (SMBs), Prof. Beatrice Failli Forzoni specializes in assisting retailers in expanding their online presence and achieving growth. Through her work, she frequently encounters the recurring obstacle of integrating offline and online sales into a cohesive omnichannel strategy. Throughout her career, she has had the opportunity to engage with over 500 companies, ranging from SMBs to large corporations. Her involvement in sales and marketing extends beyond academic research and conference attendance, as she actively contributes to the digital transformation of real companies, accelerating their progress in the ever-evolving business landscape. Recently, she contributed a chapter to the book
Sales Management for Improved Organizational
Competitiveness and Performance (ISBN: 9781668434307), which is entitled "Evaluating the Benefits of Omnichannel Retail: A Systematic Literature Review Focused on Consumers."
Preview Prof. Beatrice Failli Forzoni's chapter HERE.
Contributing Author Question & Answer
How does your professional background support your ability to be an authority on this book's coverage?
Prof. Forzoni: As a strategic consultant for SMBs, I help retailers grow their business online. Every day, I deal with their challenge to integrate offline and online sales with a coherent omnichannel strategy.
What was the driving force or motivation for starting your chapter?
Prof. Forzoni: Retail companies are undergoing a process of digital transformation that is changing the way they operate. With the growth of e-commerce, retailers that relied on their physical stores, where the majority of sales occured, had to adapt to the changes in consumer behavior. Therefore, many retail companies started to develop online channels to support sales and offer a digital experience. Despite benefits of an omnichannel strategy to provide evidence of its positive effects for brands, and give more guidelines to companies on how they can successfully implement an omnichannel strategy.
What specific problems does your chapter address?
Prof. Forzoni: Retail companies have become "omnichannel" companies, starting to integrate online and offline sales channels. This process involves every aspect of a company, from sales to operation, marketing, strategy and finance. However, the most important part is the impact on consumers' preception of a brand or a company. As the consumer point of view is often neglected by companies when structuring an omnichannel strategy, this chapter aims to analyze existing liturature about omnichannel retail, to investigate trends that relate omnichannel management with consumer related topics.
How does your chapter provide a solution to these problems?
Prof. Forzoni: Thanks to this project, it was posible to identify the need for asystematic liturature review focused on consumers, within the topic of omnichannel retail. The chapter provides an overview of the most common consumer-related topics and identifies new emerging concepts, such as empowerment, retention, co-creation, repurchase, or advocacy. This research has shown the possibility to explore omnichannel retail from different perspectives, highlighting some rising concepts that are still unexplored and that represent a new research agenda that other authors are encouraged to follow to continue enriching the literature on this topic.
About the Chapter Author
Beatrice Failli Forzoni, received her MS in Management from ESCP Business School in 2020, studying across Berlin, Paris, and Madrid and obtaining a double degree from France and Germany. In 2021, she started her PhD at King Juan Carlos University, Madrid. She writes and presents widely on issues of omnichannel retail, digital marketing, management and business, also incorporating in her works a practical perspective from her profession as a digital marketing consultant.
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