CROSS-BUYING IN RETAILING: THE ROLE OF CUSTOMER INSPIRATION

The disruption in the retail industry makes businesses struggle to stay profitable. Retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new customers and long-tenured customers are more profitable. Thus, retailers are urged to leverage existing customer relationships. One way of doing so is to cross-sell additional products to current customers. However, among the most frequently studied antecedents, scholars found conflicting evidence about the direction and significance of the effects. Under what circumstances antecedents have robust implications on cross-buying behavior remains unclear.
We try to address this gap in the existing literature by investigating the most frequently used drivers of cross-selling in past literature, along with an underlying psychological mechanism of cross-selling. We argue that cross-selling decisions are driven by customer inspiration. Three key findings emerge from the study. First, customers’ inspirational state is an essential predictor of cross-buying. Second, the study shows that customer inspiration must be viewed as a mediator rather than an additional driver. Third, some driving forces of cross-selling indirectly affect cross-buying behavior through inspiration.