The Future of Retailing: The Impact of Customer Value Enhancing Initiatives on Firm Value, Customer Perceptions and Shopping Behavior

A booming e-commerce, new digital channels, shifts in the population’s socio-demographic composition and changes in consumers’ needs, wants and shopping behavior, pose many new challenges for retailers. What is the future of retailing? To survive in this changing retail landscape, retailers have been making numerous investments in their stores as a way to differentiate from competition. This project focuses on customer value enhancing initiatives and whether they translate in improved retailer performance. Our first research question investigates in which initiatives should retailers invest to boost their firm value? In our second research question we investigate the impact of these initiatives on the customer's (a key stakeholder) perception and shopping behavior. We focus in detail on two large-scale upcoming customer value enhancing initiatives that change the role or positioning of the physical store where the initiative got implemented: (i) a store re-invention and (ii) the in-store third-party pick-up facility.

Keywords:retailing, shopping behavior, store re-invention, customer value enhancing initiatives, third-party pick-up service

Disciplines:Marketing channels and retailing