Double seminar with Dennis Herhausen and Koen Pauwels

This double seminar is part of the joint Marketing Seminars Series at Business Data Science (VU, UvA, and ESE) with a fantastic line-up of speakers that will present their research online in the Marketing Science elective course and seminar series. View all upcoming seminars in our events calendar. Please send an email to seminar@businessdatascience.nl if you are interested to participate in this seminar (series) and are not yet on the mailing list.

Program
14:30-15:00: Presentation - Dennis Herhausen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (online and offline at TI Amsterdam), "In-Store Inspiration: How to Elicit Impulse Buying in the Shopper Journey."
15:00-15:30: Presentation - Koen Pauwels, (Northeastern University, United States) (online), "Teaching Old Dogs new Tricks: After Covid-lockdowns end, Older Consumers Purchase more Online."
15:30-16:30: Discussion with the speakers

Each session will contain 30 minutes of presentation (per speaker), and roughly an hour of post-discussion with the research master and PhD students. Should you want to be present for this post-discussion (a “look behind the scenes”), feel free to let us know at seminar@businessdatascience.nl.

Presentation 1
Speaker
Dennis Herhausen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Title
In-Store Inspiration: How to Elicit Impulse Buying in the Shopper Journey

Abstract
Customer inspiration is an important source of unplanned purchases in retail stores. Our research addressed two questions related to in-store inspiration: How strongly can in-store inspiration with video ads affect unplanned purchases of individual customers? How do category and video content determine the effectiveness of video ads? We answer these research questions by combining data on exposure to certain video ads with shopping basket data while respecting the privacy of consumers. Using this novel data collection approach, we conducted 142 randomized field experiments with different video campaigns that include 52,400,331 shopping journeys in 10 supermarkets. On average, being exposed to the video campaigns increased the conversion rate by 99 percent, and 87 percent of campaigns could significantly increase the conversion rate. Nevertheless, the conversion rates range between minus 46 and plus 551 percent, and thus allow us to explore how category and video content determine the effectiveness of the ads.

Presentation 2
Speaker
Koen Pauwels (Northeastern University, United States)

Title
Teaching Old Dogs new Tricks: After Covid-lockdowns end, Older Consumers Purchase more Online

When countries responded to waves of Covid-19 via lockdowns of offline stores, consumers shifted purchases online. While this online shift during the lockdown is not surprising, consumers’ expected post-lockdown behavior is much less obvious. We analyze first-party data from more than 1000 online shops across 6 countries on 3 continents. The results show that seniors (consumers 65 years and older) increased online shopping 118% above the pre-lockdown baseline, while younger consumers largely returned to resume their expected shopping patterns. Based on Motivation-Opportunities-Ability theory, we infer that lockdowns forced older consumers to overcome their lack of perceived ability and has both shown them the benefits and sunk the cost of learning online shopping. This means a ‘return to normal’ for offline shopping is not expected—with important implications for local communities, policymakers, employees, and offline and online retailers.
Keywords: Covid-19, e-commerce, age groups, retailing