Consumer search and marketing actions in retailing

• Main Author: PENG, Yi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: retail analytics; haptic search; RCL; Marketing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/394; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/etd_coll/article/1392/viewcontent/GPBM_AY2017_PhD_YI_PENG.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This dissertation seeks to gain insight into the critical roles of consumers and marketers in a retail context using a variety of unique and rich data sources (e.g., tracking data, retail scanner data, ad intel data and publicly available data). The main aim of the two essays is to focus on unique aspects of retail analytics. The first essay examines how consumers conduct haptic search to make purchase decisions using a unique dataset collected by the state-of-the-art sensing technology. This research contributes to the literature by defining key attributes of the shoppers’ speed, consideration set, and shopping path at the shelf space and investigating the effects of consumer haptic search on price paid across food and non-food categories. This paper further provides managerial implications regarding in-store category management and shelf layout. The second essay investigates the spillover effects of recreational cannabis legalization (RCL) on related categories (i.e., alcohol, tobacco, candy, and salty snacks) using secondary data (Nielsen retailer scanner data and ad intel data). This study employs synthetic control method to show that RCL resulted in an increase in per capita dollar sales and per capita unit sales of alcohol, salty snacks, and candy, while this was not observed for tobacco sales. To rule out alternative explanations, this work identifies a "null category" (i.e., batteries) and demonstrates that RCL did not lead to changes in pricing or advertising. The findings are likely to help policymakers in understanding unintended consequences and potential problems associated with RCL such as excessive drinking and junk food consumption resulting in increasing health care expenses.