An empirical analysis of multichannel shopping for grocery products
: the effects of personality traits across online and offline channel usage

  • Kerstin Holzinger (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

Over the last years, the routes-to-market have increased with innovative new ways of reaching the end-consumer. In the UK, the grocery landscape has experienced a particularly strong proliferation of channels, resulting in the new phenomenon of multichannel shopping. It is imperative for managers to understand what drives shoppers’ channel choice in order to effectively design channel structures. This dissertation investigates the influence of personality traits onto channel choice across the shopping stages of information search, purchase and delivery. The studied personality traits are variables that vary personally and situationally and were based on the Five Factors Model and additionally generated situational traits. The dissertation further provides a customer segmentation that takes into consideration the newly adopted multichannel behaviour. Results suggest that global and situational traits impact channel adoption across the studied stages. Convenience Orientation, Value-Consciousness and Consciousness have a major impact on channel usage for in-store information search and purchasing. Technology Usefulness was found to drive information search online. Further, Consciousness and Convenience Orientation directly impact channel adoption for purchasing and delivery. Overall, three segments were identified comprising a traditional store-focused segment and two multichannel segments.
Date of Award19 Oct 2016
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorDaniel Fernandes (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Multichannel shopping
  • Online shopping
  • Grocery retailing
  • Hierarchical personality model
  • Personality traits
  • Global traits
  • Situational traits
  • Five Factor Model

Designation

  • Mestrado em Gestão: Programa Internacional

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