eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Objective of the study:

In the fashion retail industy, the adoption of multichannel approach was slower than in other sectors because of the difficulty of translating the in-store customer experience into the online environment. Clothes have been considered as "touch-and-feel" products. This is why it is interesting to study how the omnichannel environment affects fashion consumers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to achieve a better understanding of the creation of customer loyalty in an omnichannel clothing retail environment. Omnichannel retailing is relatively new phenomena and therefore, only little research has been conducted to understand it. Especially, the consumer point of view and behavior in an omnichannel world is currently lacking research. This research aims to fill this gap by studying how an omnichannel environment in clothing retail industry affects customer loyalty. More specifically, my intention is to elaborate the role of channel integration and interactivity in the customer loyalty creation since these concepts are the main characteristics of omnichannel environment. Through semi- structured interviews, deep understanding of how different customer loyalty types consider channel integration and interactivity to affect their loyalty and attitude towards Bik Bok is provided.

Data and methods:

The theoretical part of the thesis is divided into two sections: 1) theory of omnichannel retailing, channel integration and interactivity and 2) customer loyalty. As a synthesis of these two sections, a theoretical framework is presented in the end of theoretical part in order to demonstrate the relationship between omnichannel characteristics and customer loyalty in the fashion retail context. The study is qualitative in nature and the empirical data has been gathered by conducting nine semi-structured, thematic interviews. The interviewees have been divided into three different loyalty types (attitudinal, behavioral and situational) so that the concept of customer loyalty is comprehensively taken into account. This division was made through pre-interviews so that it was possible to select interviewees who have different kinds of relationships towards Bik Bok. After the data was gathered and coded into different themes, it was analyzed by using comparative analysis, where the different loyalty types were discussed regarding to channel integration and interactivity in an omnichannel fashion retail context.

Findings:

Based on the empirical data and analysis, the omnichannel characteristics (interactivity and channel integration) affect attitudinally loyal customers comprehensively. When it comes to behaviorally loyal customers, channel integration seems to have more influence on these customers than interactivity. Situationally loyal customers do not seem to be affected by interactivity but channel integration and its effects are crucial for them. All in all, it is clear that when stydying the concept of customer loyalty in an omnichannel environment the ???????different loyalty types consider the environment quite differently, which should be taken into account when managing omnichannel loyalty.