We are excited to highlight the winners of the RAPSIG Best Paper Award. This award is to recognize the top paper or papers that have made a significant contribution to the retail or pricing literature. These papers must have been published in the previous calendar year (i.e., 2019) in an English language marketing journal. The co-recipients for the Best Paper Award are Herhausen, Kleinlercher, Verhoef, Emrich & Rudolph (2019), “Loyalty Formation for Different Customer Journey Segments” Journal of Retailing, and Kanuri & Andrews (2019) ,“The Unintended Consequence of Price-Based Service Recovery Incentives” Journal of Marketing.
Abstract: The proliferation of new touchpoints empowers today’s customers to design their own journey from search to purchase. To address this new complexity, we segment customers by their use of specific touchpoints in the customer journey, investigate the association of several covariates with segment membership, consider the rise of mobile devices as potential “game changers” of existing segments, and explore how the relationships among product satisfaction, journey satisfaction, customer inspiration, and customer loyalty differ across segments. Based on anticipated utility theory and using latent class analyses on large-scale data from two samples of 2,443 and 2,649 journeys, we identify five time-consistent segments―store-focused shoppers, pragmatic online shoppers, extensive online shoppers, multiple touchpoint shoppers, and online-to-offline shoppers―that differ considerably in their touchpoint and mobile device usage, their segment-specific covariates, and their search and purchase patterns. The five segments remain unchanged in the two data sets even though the usage of mobile devices has increased substantially. Furthermore, we find that the relationships between various loyalty antecedents and customer loyalty differ between the segments. The insights from this paper help retailers develop segment-specific customer journey strategies.
Abstract: Subscription-based service providers (e.g., newspapers, internet services) often issue price-based incentives to recover from service failures. However, because considerable time may pass between when providers issue a recovery incentive and when service contracts are due for renewal, it is unclear whether recovery incentives can improve customer retention in the long run. The authors investigate this question by examining 6,919 contract renewal decisions of newspaper subscribers who received varying levels of recovery incentives after newspaper delivery failures. In contrast to conventional wisdom, they find that recovery incentives are associated with lower contract renewal likelihoods. They rationalize this finding using the economic theory of reference prices and further demonstrate that firms could mitigate the unintended consequence of recovery incentives by reminding subscribers of the original price at touch points following the recovery, discounting the renewal price, and prolonging the duration between the recovery and renewal. The authors also show that the intensity of promotions in the external environment at the time of administering recovery incentives, and that acquiring subscribers by communicating the value of the subscription service, can influence the long-term effectiveness of recovery incentives. For subscription-based service providers, the authors propose a decision support model to optimize recovery and renewal incentives and demonstrate its utility within this empirical context.
Please join us in celebrating these excellent contributions to the retailing and pricing literatures!
