Abstract
This article provides a more integrative approach toward channel choice than previous research by considering all stages of the buying process (search, purchase, and after-sales), and by taking channel attributes, experience, and spillover effects into account when examining consumers’ channel choice intentions. The authors show that such an integrative perspective is important as channel attributes, experience, and spillover matter for consumers’ channel choices in all stages of the buying process. Notably, the study stresses the importance of channel experience and spillover effects for explaining consumers’ channel choice intentions in the different stages of the buying process. Channel experience effects occur when using the channel increases the likelihood that the consumer will use the very same channel on the next occasion. Spillover effects result when the likelihood of using a channel in one stage of the buying process affects the likelihood of choosing that channel in another stage. The results show that both effects influence consumers’ channel choice intentions over and above channel attributes. Importantly, the model results strongly pledge for studying attribute, experience, and spillover effects simultaneously.
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Notes
We hired a professional market research agency to collect the data to ensure a representative sample. The agency randomly selected 500 consumers out of their panel and approached them to participate in our study. All approached consumers agreed to participate in our study.
The results are available from the first author on request.
One might argue that channel experience related to one product might influence channel utility for another product. We tested whether such cross-product experience effects exist and find no significant effects. Moreover, one might argue that experience with a channel for a certain buying stage might influence consumers’ channel choice intention for that channel in other buying stages. We therefore also examined whether such cross-stage experience effects affect consumers’ channel choice intentions. We find that only two out of six cross-stage experience effects are significant (search → purchase, purchase → search), and thus conclude that neither cross-product nor cross-stage channel experiences are critical for consumers’ channel choices.
We estimated a single, comprehensive model using all observations and noting multiple observations from each subject. Moreover, we also have run several latent class MNL models to investigate whether consumers differ in their reaction to channel attributes, experience, and spillover effects. We find that the aggregate model results in the lowest BIC and thus conclude that consumers do not significantly differ in their reaction to channel attributes, experience, and spillover effects.
A pre-test showed that perceived quality and risk are highly correlated in the after-sales stage. To avoid multicollinearity, we only consider perceived risk in the after-sales stage.
One might argue that these results are driven by high correlations between the independent variables. We have calculated these correlations, which are all below 0.45 suggesting no strong multicollinearity.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this additional exploratory analysis.
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Gensler, S., Verhoef, P.C. & Böhm, M. Understanding consumers’ multichannel choices across the different stages of the buying process. Mark Lett 23, 987–1003 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-012-9199-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-012-9199-9