Publications
Below you can find a selection of research conducted by members of our centre within each of the three pillars
What is Responsible Retailing?
Paving the Way for Responsible Retailing
Niels Holtrop, Lara Lobschat & Anne ter Braak
In today's increasingly complex and disruptive marketplace, retailers face mounting pressures from rising costs, shifting consumer expectations, and heightened regulatory scrutiny. Given these challenges, one might question whether this is the right time to focus on responsible retailing. However, this perspective often stems from a narrow and misguided view of responsible retailing as merely an added cost rather than a strategic imperative. Responsible retailing is not a short-term financial burden but a multifaceted framework that fosters long-term benefits for both businesses and society. Rather than postponing responsible retailing for more favorable economic conditions, the need for its adoption is more pressing than ever. Understanding how and why responsible retailing works is critical to ensuring its effective implementation in today's retail landscape.
To further this understanding, I have invited the founding scholars of the Center for Responsible Retailing at Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics to offer their insights. As pioneers in the field, they provide a comprehensive perspective on the concept, its impact, and its relevance in both academic research and retail practice. Their contributions in this guest editorial not only clarify misconceptions but also serve as a catalyst for further scholarly exploration, equipping retailers with the knowledge needed to integrate responsible retailing into their business models effectively.
Do offline and online go hand in hand? Cross-channel and synergy effects of direct mailing and display advertising
Lisan Lesscher, Lara Lobschat & Peter C. Verhoef
Despite the rise of digital, direct mailing as a marketing communication tool remains relevant and widely applied in practice. Nevertheless, research into the effectiveness of direct mailing in the online environment is scant. Key questions that remain entail how direct mails affect different online and offline consumer activity metrics throughout the purchase funnel and how they interact with digital marketing communication tools. The current paper, therefore, investigates these two questions by conducting two studies. First, we focus on the effect of direct mailing on zip-code level upper, middle, and lower funnel performance metrics over time by analyzing quasi-experimental data from a large European insurance firm. The results reveal that direct mailing significantly influences consumer activity metrics in the online channel (i.e., online search and clicking behavior), in support of cross-channel effects of direct mailing. Moreover, direct mailing is shown to be effective throughout the purchase funnel, both directly and indirectly, with a positive net sales effect. Second, we study the joint effect of direct mailing and display advertising by analyzing field experiment data from the same insurance firm. The results show positive synergy between direct mailing and display advertising. Therefore, despite the rise of digital, direct mailing still serves as an effective marketing tool, both by itself and in combination with digital marketing.
Serving Customers
Timing Customer Reactivation Initiatives
Niels Holtrop & Jaap E. Wieringa
Firms operating in non-contractual settings apply customer reactivation initiatives such as email messages to stimulate customers who have become inactive temporarily or permanently to resume their transaction activities. Thus, firms need to know which customers are inactive, and when a customer becomes inactive. Existing approaches struggle to distinguish active from inactive customers and do not provide time-scale estimates of when to send reactivation mails. To address these shortcomings, we develop an approach to target and time the sending of reactivation mails. Building on control chart methods, we introduce a gamma–gamma control chart, modelling the average customer interpurchase time and the variation therein to determine activity boundaries. Crossing these boundaries signals a potential change in a customer’s purchasing activity, providing a signal to initiate customer reactivation. A field experiment in the greetings and gifts industry, supported by several additional analyses, illustrates the improved performance of our approach when it comes to signaling customer activity against a wide range of competing models. The improved performance of our method occurs particularly in settings where customers vary strongly in purchase and inactivity patterns.
Going healthy: how product characteristics influence the sales impact of front-of-pack health symbols
Stijn Maesen, Lien Lamey, Anne ter Braak & Leon Jansen
Manufacturers increasingly adopt health symbols, which translate overall product healthiness into a single symbol, to communicate about the overall healthiness of their grocery products. This study examines how the performance implications of adding a front-of-pack health symbol to a product vary across products. We study the sales impact of a government-supported health symbol program in 29 packaged categories, using over four years of scanner data. The results indicate that health symbols are most impactful when they positively disconfirm pre-existing beliefs that a product is not among the healthiest products within the category. More specifically, we find that health symbols are more effective for (i) products with a front-of-pack taste claim, (ii) lower priced products, and (iii) private label products. Furthermore, these results are more pronounced in healthier categories than in unhealthier categories. Our findings imply that health symbols can help overcome lay beliefs among consumers regarding a product’s overall healthiness. As such, adding a health symbol provides easy-to-process information about product healthiness for the consumer and can increase product sales for the manufacturer.
Caring for the Planet
Corporate Digital Responsibility
Lara Lobschat, Benjamin Müller, Felix Eggers, Laura Brandimarte, Sarah Diefenbach, Mirja Kroschke & Jochen Wirtz
We propose that digital technologies and related data become increasingly prevalent and that, consequently, ethical concerns arise. Looking at four principal stakeholders, we propose corporate digital responsibility (CDR) as a novel concept. We define CDR as the set of shared values and norms guiding an organization's operations with respect to four main processes related to digital technology and data. These processes are the creation of technology and data capture, operation and decision making, inspection and impact assessment, and refinement of technology and data. We expand our discussion by highlighting how to managerially effectuate CDR compliant behavior based on an organizational culture perspective. Our conceptualization unlocks future research opportunities, especially regarding pertinent antecedents and consequences. Managerially, we shed first light on how an organization's shared values and norms regarding CDR can get translated into actionable guidelines for users. This provides grounds for future discussions related to CDR readiness, implementation, and success.
Protecting the Customer
Healthy Shopping Dynamics: The Healthiness of Sequential Grocery Choices
Koert van Ittersum, Martine van der Heide, Niels Holtrop, Tammo Bijjmolt & Jenny van Doorn
Improving the healthiness of diets can be realized by replacing unhealthy with healthier product alternatives when shopping for groceries. For this strategy to be effective, shoppers need to consistently make healthier choices. However, shoppers may end up balancing the healthiness of their choices throughout the shopping trip, (partly) offsetting the benefits of a healthy product choice (e.g., low-fat milk) by an unhealthy subsequent choice (e.g., sugary cornflakes). Across two studies, one study with purchase data from a brick-and-mortar supermarket and one online experimental study, we empirically demonstrate that the relative healthiness of an initial product choice is indeed inversely related to the relative healthiness of the subsequent choice, regardless of the category of both products. That means: a relatively healthy choice is followed by a relatively unhealthier choice, and vice versa. Furthermore, the strength of this balancing effect differs depending on the nature of the product category; the dynamic effect is less pronounced when subsequently choosing within a vice (vs. virtue) product category. In the brick-and-mortar supermarket, the dynamics also become less pronounced as the shopping trip progresses. These findings contribute to literature on in-store decision-making and within-trip dynamics, and underscore the need for retailers to have a thorough understanding of these healthy shopping dynamics in order to effectively promote healthier baskets in support of the growing demand for healthy diets.