Predicting Trends and Building Strategies for Consumer Engagement in Retail Environments

The deep recession might explain the crush of big retailers, still, in decay after great recession retailers face the meltdown. In post-recession period, they have the real situation: overall retail spending steadily, if a little barely. The possible low-economy level of countries might not affect this situation; in fact, many of them face recovery in economic terms as growth of wages and GDP, reduced unemployment and fuel gas, so the trend of steady shopping might be influenced by other factors: the increase of online shopping, the change of consumer aspirations and habits, the overwhelmed assortments in shopping malls, the revival of restaurants experience. In today’s digitalized and hyper connected environment, customers are at least expecting retailers to realize and achieve their needs “on” time. Retail is heavily impacted by the digital revolution and specifically digital technology, which is the enabler that drives winning engagement for all. Customer experience doesn’t constraint in creating a satisfactory experience during their sales journey but creating customer loyalty. Consumers’ purchase experience patterns are complex and customers definitely want quality, service, offers and convenience in their transaction with retailers. The consumer becomes so often “seeker for discounts”, “bargain-hunters”, and “fan of fast-fashion outlets”. This dynamic nature of consumer behavior and evolving technology has created unforeseen circumstances and opportunities for retailers! The key question is: are retailers ready to capitalize disruptive technologies and innovative methods and gain a consumer’s attention? Confronting these phenomena there is a need in a research world to explore what is the today’s consumer profile, what are occurring inside and outside of retail environment, and accordingly set the frameworks for future recovery strategies. The purpose of the book is to explore the external and internal influence on consumer shopping in a retail store, considering the multi-disciplinary approach, with the objective to help retailers to overcome current situation, to find and better predict trends, rebuilt and implement strategies in various retail segments. The book analyzes customer engagement, a very interesting topic and currently discussed among scholars. By analyzing the contributions in this research area, it emerges that the focus is on the analysis of the attitudinal and behavioral dimensions of customer engagement, its antecedents and consequences, and its evolution on social media The subject area covers multiple disciplines related to retail business as a retail management, relational marketing, digital marketing, consumer behaviour and marketing management. It is necessary to link the various disciplines in order to explore the factors that influence the consumer behaviour inside and outside of a retail store. Under the retail context can be considered any retail format with its microenvironment offering products and service in which also the other provider of services (e.g. touristic xiv accommodations) can be included. By meaning of an environment, it can be any environment that a retail format interacts with or is influenced by, e.g. macroeconomic environment, international markets, micro-environment, web-environment, also impact of weather, technology, demographics structure etc.