| Abstract: |
In-store social crowdedness is an indispensable contextual component that shapes customers’ offline shopping experience. Studies on the effects of social crowdedness primarily utilize laboratory settings, and the findings are mixed. Leveraging smart traffic counters installed at 1,800 brick-and-mortar stores across the malls of a large property group, we accurately calibrate social crowdedness at the store- and hour-level. In addition, we link visits to different stores by customers who are members of the property group using their transaction records. Whereas existing literature focuses on in-store purchases alone, this unique data offers an opportunity to examine how social crowdedness affects customer behaviors at three distinct stages: prior to, during, and after a store visit. We find that, overall, in-store social crowdedness leads to more store visits and sales, and it creates some substitution between current and future shopping trips, i.e., customers extend their current trips while postponing the next ones after experiencing a high level of social crowdedness. Additionally, while more members are drawn to stores with higher levels of crowdedness, the sales boost is mainly contributed by members at lower membership tiers and to a larger extent by nonmembers. The positive effects of social crowdedness are more pronounced for younger male customers and members with longer tenure. Finally, the substitution effect is homogeneous across members. Together, these findings shed light on the holistic effects of social crowdedness during and across customers’ shopping trips, providing rich managerial implications for context-based marketing.
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Biography:
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Yacheng Sun is Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. He is Recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and a Young Changjiang Scholar.
Sun serves as the Area Editor of Journal of Marketing Science, Editorial Board Member of Asia Marketing Journal, Department Head of Marketing at Tsinghua SEM, Academic Director of Master-in-Management Program at Tsinghua SEM, and Director of China Retail Research Center at Tsinghua SEM.
His main research areas are big data marketing, platform marketing, and customer relationship management. His research has appeared at top international journals including PNAS, Operations Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Harvard Business Review etc. His research has won various awards including the First Prize of Excellent Achievements in Scientific Research granted by the Ministry of Education, the Second Prize of Outstanding Achievements in Philosophy and Social Sciences granted by Beijing Municipality, and the First Prize of Teaching Achievements at Tsinghua University, the Second Prize of Teaching Achievements in Beijing, etc. His research has been reported by various domestic and foreign media including People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, China Daily, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Toronto Star, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Times of India, NBC News, CBC News.
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