In-Store Social Crowdedness and Customer Behaviors

主講人 : 孫亞程 教授

In-store social crowdedness is an indispensable contextual component that shapes customers’offline shopping experience. Studies on the effects of social crowdedness primarily utilizelaboratory settings, and the findings are mixed. Leveraging smart traffic counters installed at 1,800brick-and-mortar stores across the malls of a large property group, we accurately calibrate socialcrowdedness at the store- and hour-level. In addition, we   visits to different stores by customerswho 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 socialcrowdedness affects customer behaviors at three distinct stages: prior to, during, and after a storevisit. We find that, overall, in-store social crowdedness leads to more store visits and sales, and itcreates some substitution between current and future shopping trips, i.e., customers extend theircurrent 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 malecustomers and members with longer tenure. Finally, the substitution effect is homogeneous acrossmembers. Together, these findings shed light on the holistic effects of social crowdedness duringand across customers’ shopping trips, providing rich managerial implications for context- dmarketing.

主講人簡介：

孫亞程，清華大學經管學院教授，清華經管營銷系系主任、清華經管學院中國零售研究中心主任，國家級人才。他的主要研究領域為大數據營銷、平臺營銷和顧客關系管理。在國際期刊PNAS, Operations Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Harvard Business Review上發表多篇論文。獲教育部高等學校科學研究優秀成果獎一等獎，二等獎、北京市哲學社會科學優秀成果獎二等獎,以及清華大學教學成果一等獎和北京市教學成果二等獎等。他的研究被《人民日報》、《新華社》、《中國日報》、《華爾街日報》、《哈佛商業評論》、《多倫多星報》、《赫芬頓郵報》、《每日郵報》、《印度時報》、美國全國廣播公司、加拿大廣播公司等多家國內外媒體報道。