Customer Supercharging in Experience-Centric Channels

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bell, David R.; Gallino, Santiago; Moreno, Antonio
• 署名单位: University of Pennsylvania; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3453
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 4096-4107
• 关键词: Retail operations; marketing-operations interface; Omnichannel Retailing; experience attributes; quasi-experimental methods

摘要

We conjecture that for online retailers, experience-centric offline store formats do not simply expand market coverage, but rather, serve to significantly amplify future positive customer behaviors, both online and offline. We term this phenomenon supercharging and test our thesis using data from a digital-first men's apparel retailer and a pioneer of the so-called zero inventory store (ZIS) format-a small-footprint, experience-centric retail location that carries no inventory for immediate fulfillment, but fulfils orders via e-commerce. Using a risk-set matching approach, we calibrate our estimates on customers who are treated, that is, have a ZIS experience, and matched with identical customers who shop online only. We find that after the ZIS experience, customers spend more, shop at a higher velocity, and are less likely to return items. The positive impact on returns is doubly virtuous as it is more pronounced for more tactile, higher-priced items, thus mitigating a key pain point of online retail. Furthermore, the ZIS shopping experience aids product discovery and brand attachment, causing sales to becomemore diffuse over a larger number of categories. Finally, we demonstrate that our results are robust to self-selection and potentially confounding effects of unobservable factors on the matched pairs of customers. Implications for retailing practice, including for legacy, offline-first retailers, are discussed.