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Are you looking for something specific or just looking around? Adaptive selling on the basis of customer shopping goals in retail sales

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Abstract

A key advantage that brick-and-mortar retailers have over online retailers is their salespeople, who can adaptively interact with customers on a one-on-one basis. When starting an interaction with a customer, a retail salesperson generally first aims to determine their shopping goal (Hall et al., Journal of Marketing, 79(3), 91–109, 2015), often with questions such as, “How can I help you today?” Yet, little is known in the literature or in practice about how salespeople should adapt their sales approach based on customers’ shopping goals. This is unfortunate, because customers clearly want better help from salespeople, and the potential gains of doing so are substantial (Accenture, 2021; Hochstein et al., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(1), 118–137, 2019). To address this limitation, this research focuses on the practice of adaptive selling in retail settings, in which salespeople adapt their tactics on the basis of customers’ shopping goals. Using information processing theory, we propose that matching sales influence tactics (SITs) to two aspects of customers’ shopping goals, namely goal specificity and product type (utilitarian vs. hedonic), improves purchase outcomes. Across a series of field and lab experiments, we demonstrate that purchase behavior and purchase intention are higher when salespeople use informational (emotional) SITs with customers who have a high (low) shopping goal specificity level, which we term the match strategy. The match strategy has a direct positive effect on purchase outcomes and an effect mediated by processing fluency on purchase outcomes, with product type serving as a moderator. This research concludes with specific, actionable recommendations for retail salespeople and managers.

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Notes

  1. We note that our field study (Study 1) is conducted with customers who may be categorized as consumers or business customers. Nevertheless, Study 1 mirrors the relevant factors for our brick-and-mortar (B2C) context because these are first interactions only, there is a single decision maker, the purchase decision typically occurs during the sales call, the decision maker is typically the user of the product, and there are no expectations of future sales interactions.

  2. Our focus is on whether the customer has a goal of shopping for a utilitarian or hedonic product and not on the motivation for the product purchase or shopping trip.

  3. The study was conducted from January 31, 2019, to January 3, 2020. Controlling for language, geographical region, and previous customer encounter experience restricted the number of interactions that were eligible to be included in the study, which resulted in a smaller number of collected data points. No data were excluded in the analysis.

  4. The negative coefficient is due to the coding of the variables.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the entire JAMS review team for their insightful and helpful feedback and guidance throughout the revision process. Further, we would like to thank Sascha Alavi, Ayse Öncüler, Anne Roggeveen, and Sara Rosengren for their constructive comments on the earlier drafts of this article. This research was partially funded by the ESSEC Research Center.

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  1. EDHEC Business School, 24 Avenue Gustave Delory, 59100, Roubaix, France

    Yenee Kim

  2. ESSEC Business School, 3 Avenue Bernard Hirsch, 95000, Cergy-Pontoise, France

    Richard G. McFarland

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Kim, Y., McFarland, R.G. Are you looking for something specific or just looking around? Adaptive selling on the basis of customer shopping goals in retail sales. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01015-y

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