Matthias Eggenschwiler

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.

The abundance of new touchpoints (e.g., mobile apps, price comparison portals), stakeholders (e.g., manufacturers, other customers), and technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, virtual reality) that shape today’s customer journey have rendered retailing more complex, fast-moving, and competitive than ever before. In light of the high demands on retail managers of tomorrow to use innovative practices and service solutions for delivering customized and delightful customer experiences, educational institutions struggle to make their courses more relevant for the challenges that students are about to be confronted with in their professional life. With the help of two qualitative studies, this paper investigates the role of experiential learning in triggering transformative learning, i.e., the process of continuous critical reflection and perspective transformation, among students, retail managers, and frontline employees. Findings reveal that experiential learning formats may induce students’ transformative learning along five different categories centered on the students’ self and the interaction between the self and others. Our results extend research on retailing and experiential and transformative learning and derive valuable implications for retailers and educators alike.

A smile alone does not guarantee excellent customer service, but excellent customer service almost always starts with a smile. However, mask-wearing obligations in nearly all service interactions cover friendly smiles during COVID-19. Results from two studies indicate that customers can decode employee smiles even when covered with a face mask. If employees express a neutral or negative emotion, mask-wearing covers the unfavorable emotions and increases perceived warmth. Wearing a smiling mask, increases perceived warmth even more strongly, leading to better service evaluations through a serial mediation with rapport. These findings enrich our understanding of face masks in service encounters.

Social commerce and live shopping are on the rise. Major retailer across the globe have started marketing their products on live streams directly to billions of customers. Still, live shopping has not yet received much attention in marketing research. In this article, we build upon findings from service and marketing research to study the role of the salesperson in live shopping. In an online experiment, we show that the excessive expression of positive emotions trough smiling negatively affects perceived expertise of the salesperson and purchase intentions for the advertised hedonic product. For utilitarian products, we find no influence of positive emotions on purchase intentions. Implications for research and practice are being discussed.

Feeling grounded or emotionally and deeply rooted gives consumers a sense of safety, strength and stability. Products can make consumers feel grounded by connecting them to their physical, social and historical surroundings. Products that provide consumers with a feeling of groundedness are more attractive than products that do not. Recent research suggests that the season can influence consumers' need and feeling of groundedness. However, the question of when and why this effect appears remains open. We employ an online experiment with 220 participants from the UK to investigate the influence of the season on consumers need and feeling of groundedness. Using structural equation modelling, we show that consumers' having a higher need for groundedness also have a stronger feeling of groundedness. We demonstrate that consumers have a higher feeling of groundedness during colder seasons. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and propose promising avenues for future research.

Wie kann es gelingen, trotz stark angestiegener Sparneigung, den Umsatz zu halten? Die Kundeninspirationsstudie des Forschungszentrums für Handelsmanagement an der Universität St.Gallen gibt Auskunft. Waren es 2016 noch 27.8% der Schweizer Bevölkerung, die künftig sparen möchten, so stieg dieser Wert 2023 auf 39.3% an. Ein bemerkenswerter Anstieg, der sich auch in der negativen Entwicklung der Konsumentenstimmung des Staatssekretariats für Wirtschaft SECO widerspiegelt. Die erhöhte Sparneigung unter Konsument:innen zwingt viele Detailhändler zum Handeln. Häufig bedeutet das: Mehr Rabattaktionen und damit Margenverlust. Eine neu aufgelegte Studie des IRM-HSG unterstreicht die Rolle von Kundeninspiration, damit Handelsunternehmen auch in herausfordernden Zeiten wirtschaftlich erfolgreich zu bleiben. Haupterkenntnisse der Studie: Eine Steigerung der Kundeninspiration um einen Skalenpunkt führte 2023 zu einem 12,5% höheren Einkaufsbetrag. Kundenzufriedenheit hingegen hatte 2023 keinen signifikanten Einfluss auf die Einkaufsbeträge (+0,05%). Inspirierte Kunden kaufen mehr Produkte (+79%) zu höheren Preisen (+105%) und zeigen sich loyaler (+34%) gegenüber Detailhändlern. Soziale Medien und das Verkaufspersonal spielten eine wichtige Rolle bei der Inspiration von Konsument:innen.

A smile alone does not guarantee excellent customer service, but excellent customer service almost always starts with a smile. However, face mask obligations in nearly all service interactions all around the world cover around 60-70% of the face area during COVID-19, and this newly covered face area is crucial for facial emotional reading, including friendly smile detection. Results from two online studies and one field study indicate that most customers can decode employee smiles even when covered with a face mask. If employees express a neutral or negative emotion, mask-wearing covers the unfavorable emotions and, thus, increases perceived warmth. This effect can be mitigated by wearing smiling masks. Smiling masks increase perceived warmth, leading to higher customer inspiration through a serial mediation with rapport, and finally end up in more successful service evaluations (i.e., higher customer satisfaction, more positive word-of-mouth communication, and higher average ticket sizes). These findings enrich our understanding of face masks in service encounters. We extend the literature on emotional services and show that emotional contagion may occur through artificially created facial expressions (i.e., a smile printed on a mask). Furthermore, we recommend that managers empower their employees to display friendly smiles, even under masks.