1st year PhD presentation - Alina Diana Both

Alina Diana Both presents her PhD project

Info about event

Time

Thursday 13 January 2022,  at 13:00 - 13:45

Location

via Teams

Organizer

Department of Management

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Alina Diana Both: 'Omnichannel Storytelling: Towards a Novel Understanding of Modern Customer Journeys'
Supervisors: Sascha Steinmann & Polymeros Chrysochou
Discussants: Jakob Lauring & Irene Pollach

Abstract
Within the field of retail management, grasping the customer journey has been established as a vital success factor for brands and businesses. However, as retailers and brands become more intertwined with people’s lives both on- and offline, the need for more encompassing approaches which look beyond the service encounter itself, spanning the entire system of channels at marketers’ disposal, has been recognised. With new technologies and digital retail marketing channels emerging and evolving rapidly within the current economic climate, the need for effective strategies to understand customers' sense-making processes has grown all the more pressing. In fact, the recent pandemic has arguably transformed the ways in which brands and customers interact with each other even more radically and perhaps irrevocably. Consequently, there is a clear need for practitioners to find the means of creating more intimate, personal ways of establishing their brand while meeting elevated customer expectations, a need which places the customer at the very core of the customer journey. Within the field of marketing, the potential of storytelling has long been realised as a source for creating emotional and memorable connections to a brand. However, today's omnichannel brands are faced with the challenge of telling a coherent story across an ever-growing multitude of touchpoints and channels, forming a multi-associative network for customers to navigate and make sense of.

To address these developments, this project aims to examine and advance impactful marketing strategies for offline-, online-, and omnichannel retailing by placing its focus on narratives as a way of sense-making along customer journeys. Thus, the project proposes a narrative-based understanding of the phenomenon of omnichannel customer journeys building on post-modern, Barthesian theory. In doing so, it offers a novel way of viewing brand narratives dispersed across different channels and touchpoints. In collaboration with major Danish retail brands, a multi-method study encompassing both qualitative and quantitative data represents an attempt at grasping this phenomenon as comprehensively as possible. As such, this research seeks to examine and conceptualise a highly complex process within an ever-evolving environment and arrive at valuable insights based on one of humanity’s oldest, most inherent, and therefore most effective practices - storytelling.

Everyone is welcome!