_{A PHD PROJECT BY | ALINA DIANA BOTH}

As retailers and brands become more intertwined with people’s lives both on- and offline, research has recognised the need for more holistic approaches which go beyond the service encounter itself, spanning the entire multichannel system at marketers’ disposal. With new technologies and digital retail marketing measures emerging and evolving rapidly within the current economic climate, the need for effective strategies to influence customer behaviour has grown all the more pressing.

However, research remains uncertain when it comes to understanding and reconstructing people’s motives – a knowledge gap that becomes all the more complex with the introduction of digitalisation.

Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop and elucidate impactful marketing strategies for offline-, online-, and omnichannel retailing through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods. To this end, special focus will be placed on customers’ behaviour along the customer journey, which is conceived of as a highly co-creative and subjective process.

This project aims to contribute to existing retail management research by generating an experience-based understanding of meaning co-creation through storytelling along the customer journey. In addition, the project will contribute insights into e-channels and digital means of enhancing user- and customer experience to a research field which has thus far placed more emphasis on classical desktop-based channels. On the basis of the findings generated over the course of this research, concrete implications for retail management- and marketing practice may be formulated.

Supervisor: Sascha Steinmann

Co-Supervisor: Polymeros Chrysochou