Dhruv Grewal

Babson College · Division of Marketing

The profound impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to evolve over the next several decades, and many of these impacts will emerge through marketing-related AI applications. Therefore, marketers, public policymakers, firms, researchers, and individual consumers must recognize and understand the benefits that AI offers, as well as the...

Many disgruntled consumers who experience service failures turn to brand sabotage, by posting vindictive posts on social media platforms. Such aggressive revenge behavior has the goal of influencing others and causing harm to a firm. Vindictive posts require a response from the firm, to limit their potential negative influence on other consumers wh...

In cobotic service teams, employees and robots collaborate to serve customers. As cobotic teams become more prevalent, a key question arises: How do consumers respond to cobotic teams, as a function of the roles shared by employees and robots (robots in superordinate roles as team leaders and humans in subordinate roles as assistants, or vice versa...

Marketers today are increasingly using storytelling to engage their audiences. However, the design of narrative visuals is often inspired by a text-centric understanding of narratives. Despite the fast increase in visual content and the distinct processing it induces, extant research on visual narrativity remains fragmented, lacking a comprehensive...

Customer perceived value (CPV) is a cornerstone of marketing literature. However, myriad studies have generated contradictory empirical findings. In addition, though some existing literature reviews help clarify the conceptual foundations of CPV, the literature lacks a meta-analysis of empirical evidence about the CPV model and its effects. To cons...

To understand why and how marketing educators can best use generative artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, this article integrates a literature survey, interviews with both marketing educators and managers, and surveys of both marketing educators and students. In leveraging these inputs, the authors argue that generative AI can significan...

When Journal of Service Research (JSR) completed its fifth lustrum in 2022, it offered an ideal opportunity to celebrate the present, review the past, and look forward to the service research community’s future. In reference to JSR’s specific aims to be rigorous, multidisciplinary, managerially relevant, and impactful, the current mixed-method stud...

This research examines how retailers convey messages to target customers and facilitate purchase decisions in physical settings. To establish a clear organizing framework for communications in physical settings, the current article examines both how and why retailers communicate with customers. Specifically, the authors address “how” questions from...

Blood donations are integral to global healthcare service industries, which suffer from insufficient short-term supply to meet long-term patient demands as companies struggle to convert short-term donors into long-term donors. In response, companies seek to encourage long-term blood donations by altering the public nature of events, a practice with...

Unlabelled: As part of their customer engagement (CE) marketing, firms use different platforms to interact with customers, in ways that go beyond purchases. Task-based CE strategies call for customers' participation in structured, often incentivized tasks; experiential CE initiatives instead aim to stimulate pleasurable experiences for customers....

In realizing that consumers regularly straddle the work–life interface, some companies position their products according to their ability to address work and life needs together, then communicate this offering to consumers. Whether using a work–life positioning strategy is effective remains unclear though. If this strategy signals work–life enrichm...

This research investigates how shopping on a weekday or a weekend moderates the impact of music on supermarket sales. Contrary to the intuitive beliefs of interviewed store managers, a meta-analysis, two field studies, and a controlled experimental study indicate that playing pleasant music (vs. no music) in supermarkets on weekdays enhances sales,...

In-store communication delivered through technology formats (e.g., kiosk, digital display) as well as non-technology formats (e.g., magazine cover, flyer) can help retailers enhance sales by delivering relevant content to consumers. Although prior research has primarily examined the effects of deal-oriented content that primarily offers promotions...

To predict how robots will affect the future of retailing, the authors begin this article with a brief review of recent deployments of robots in the retail and service sectors, along with relevant research pertaining to their uses. Next, they focus on two crucial dimensions, reflecting whether the robots (1) are customer facing or not and (2) inten...

Abstract Background Diet is important for chronic disease management, with limited research understanding dietary choices among those with multi-morbidity, the state of having 2 or more chronic conditions. The objective of this study was to identify associations between packaged food and drink purchases and diet-related cardiometabolic multi-morbid...

Digital technologies are key to achieving competitive advantage across marketing and retailing contexts. At the same time, marketing managers are confronted with a variety of challenges surrounding the strategic use of these technologies and the need to re-think their digital strategies. Importantly, managers need to develop a deeper understanding...

Existing literature offers multiple suggestions for how to recover from service failures, though without explicitly addressing customers’ negative, high arousal states, evoked by the failure. The few studies that address ways to improve negative emotions after failures focus on face-to-face interactions only. Because most customers today prefer soc...

Retailers increasingly use digital displays and projections to enhance traditional endcaps. With two field experiments, the authors investigate how the vividness of an endcap projection affects shoppers. The results indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between the vividness of an endcap projection and sales, such that endcaps with moderately...

Widespread, and growing, use of artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled voice assistants (VAs) creates a pressing need to understand what drives VA evaluations. This article proposes a new framework wherein perceptions of VA artificiality and VA intelligence are positioned as key drivers of VA evaluations. Building from work on signaling theory, AI, t...

Purpose Artificial intelligence–enabled voice assistants (VAs), such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, are available in smartphones, smart speakers, and other digital devices and channels. Use of these VAs is growing rapidly and are expected to significantly impact purchase intentions. This article focuses on how the communicat...

This manuscript draws attention to the dawn of the Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) and highlights its potential for addressing a host of issues within retail and service domains. With a retailing and service perspective, the authors outline the meaning of the 5IR, according to a 2 × 2 framework that categorizes retailers and service providers by...

Efforts to measure customer experiences (CX) in multifaceted, omnichannel, retail contexts are crucial but lacking research guidance. Prior service quality literature has established methods for measuring CX in traditional, single-channel contexts but not adapted such measures to omnichannel contexts. With a mixed method research design and studies...

That artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to provide significant benefits is generally accepted by both practitioners and scholars. However, the dark side of AI is less discussed, and less understood. In this paper, the authors first classify the wellspring of AI benefits in both B2C and B2B settings. In B2C settings AI benefits are prima...

Digital marketing communication, that is, communication through digital or electronic media among businesses and consumers, is growing rapidly, especially during the COVID-19 era. We propose a framework for analyzing digital marketing communication along four major dyads, business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), consumer-to-consumer...

The ways in which emergent technologies are disrupting retailing are manifold. The Internet, social media, mobile technologies, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, and natural user interfaces all combine to grant consumers access to more information and channels than ever before, through virtually seamless connections with retaile...

The purpose of this special issue is to encourage the emerging role of analytics in marketing and public policy research. We draw attention to a multitude of comprehensive data sources and analytical techniques that tackle important public policy and marketing issues. We highlight six key domains that provide fruitful avenues for such pursuit: reta...

The proliferating gig economy relies on online freelance marketplaces, which support relatively anonymous interactions by text-based messages. Informational asymmetries thus arise that can lead to exchange uncertainties between buyers and freelancers. Conventional marketing thought recommends reducing such uncertainty. However, uncertainty reductio...

Retailing academics and practitioners must develop close, collaborative relationships, which might involve various, meaningful efforts to assist the other side of the collaboration while also furthering their own respective objectives. Only through such collaborations can retailing ensure sufficient research rigor and relevance to advance the field...

Artificial intelligence (AI) will substantially impact retailing. Building on past research and from interviews with senior managers, we examine how senior retailing managers should think about adopting AI, involving factors such as the extent to which an AI application is customer-facing, the amount of value creation, whether the AI application is...

Digital communication, the electronic transmission of information, reflects and influences consumers’ perceptions, attitudes, behaviors, and shopping journeys. Thus, data stemming from digital communication is an important source of insights for retailers, manufacturers, and service firms alike. This article discusses emerging trends and recent adv...

The world of retailing is being reimagined and transformed at breakneck speeds due to new technologies, as well as due to changes in consumer purchasing behavior resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This dynamic retail marketplace is forcing retailers to strategize how to best position themselves to survive and flourish in this environment. Recogn...

This research highlights the importance of retailer-consumer identity congruence – the match between the retail brand identity and the consumers’ identity. Retailers can leverage identity congruence to forge meaningful consumer-brand relationships which will result in enhanced engagement, brand loyalty, and willingness to pay. The paper discusses h...

The clothes we wear have considerable power over how others perceive us (e.g., Forsythe 1990) and these perceptions are often internalized. Yet, despite knowing this, the children’s clothing market is incredibly gendered, offering female children shirts with stereotypical feminine images and words such as “kind” and “sweet”, while young boys can ch...

Confronted with increasing digitalization, service firms are challenged to sustain customer loyalty. A promising means to do so is to leverage the digital presence of service employees on their website. A large-scale field study and several experimental studies show that the digital presence of service employees on the firm website increases curren...

Despite noteworthy advances in theory and retail practice, the extant scholarship on customer privacy concerns is scattered across a wide range of academic domains and remains fragmented, in terms of both conceptual breadth and empirical results. This lack of convergence creates a pertinent need for a comprehensive synthesis to guide to further the...

Human enhancement technology (HET) is advancing a host of industries, yet it remains limited in its retail, sales, and service applications. Soon, however, these technologies appear likely to have notable impacts on customer experiences. To address their potential influences on customer–employee interactions and the customer experience, this articl...

Une approche pratique du marketing Cette adaptation française de Marketing traite des concepts fondamentaux de la discipline et des stratégies que mettent en oeuvre ses acteurs pour créer de la valeur à l’intention des consommateurs. Misant sur l’équilibre entre la théorie et la pratique, l’ouvrage comprend une variété d’exemples d’entreprises et...

Anecdotal evidence is mixed regarding whether handheld scanners used in stores increase or decrease consumer sales. This article reports on three field studies, supported by eye-tracking technology and matched sales receipts, as well as two laboratory studies that show that handheld scanner use increases sales, notably through unplanned, healthier,...

Customer journey management (CJM) and understanding the role of customer experiences at each stage of the journey is of paramount importance to retailers and manufacturers to survive and thrive in this technology intensive environment. In this special issue we have focused on the following themes: the role of technology, the importance of social, c...

This chapter examines how luxury brands should consider customer experience in a multi-channel world. Building from the customer experience framework and the store environment framework, we present a framework focused on customer behavior and experience. We then focus on three aspects which are particularly important for luxury retailers to conside...

A proposed design–ambient–social–trialability (DAST) framework for retail atmospherics broadens conceptualizations to encompass not only the in-store experience but also out-of-store experiences that the retailer can control or influence. In turn, it expands understanding of retail atmospherics to incorporate multiple retail touchpoints that a cust...

To remain competitive, brick-and-mortar retailers need to create unique, engaging in-store experiences, such that they evolve from simply competing at a merchandise level and ensure holistic retail experiences that encourage customers to keep coming back. In this chapter, we examine how the five sensory components – vision, audition, olfaction, tou...

This paper introduces a conceptual framework for understanding new and futuristic in-store technology infusions. First, we develop a 2 × 2 typology of different innovative and futuristic technologies focusing on their level of convenience and social presence for the consumer. Next, we offer a series of propositions based on the idea that convenienc...

In the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to substantially change both marketing strategies and customer behaviors. Building from not only extant research but also extensive interactions with practice, the authors propose a multidimensional framework for understanding the impact of AI involving intelligence levels, task types, and wheth...

This article contributes to research on advertising effectiveness by investigating the combined influence of ad headlines and visual patterns in the ad on consumer product evaluations. Headlines can convey motion (e.g., “move,” “quick”); when the associated ad features a regular visual pattern, it evokes stronger product evaluations than if it depi...

Some retailers offer price match guarantees, whereas others offer guarantees making the same promise but labeling these low-price guarantees. Do consumers respond differently to these different price guarantee labels? To address this research question, this paper leverages insights from pricing, signaling, and regulatory focus theories to demonstra...

Despite growing applications of social and healthcare marketing to enhance public well-being through anti-stigma campaigns, little research investigates how public stigma surrounding health conditions might limit the outcomes of these campaigns. By drawing on the theory of implicit worldviews, this study identifies reasons for public stigma as well...

Impulse buying by consumers has received considerable attention in consumer research. The phenomenon is interesting because it is not only prompted by a variety of internal psychological factors but also influenced by external, market-related stimuli. The meta-analysis reported in this article integrates findings from 231 samples and more than 75,0...

Interactions between consumers and humanoid service robots (HSRs; i.e., robots with a human-like morphology such as a face, arms, and legs) will soon be part of routine marketplace experiences. It is unclear, however, whether these humanoid robots (compared with human employees) will trigger positive or negative consequences for consumers and compa...

Despite the critical role that store managers play in linking top management teams and service/retail employees, as well as in fulfilling corporate strategy within chain store environments, service management research infrequently addresses the factors that may promote store managers’ effective exchange relationships within the firm and subsequent...

This paper investigates country-of-origin (CO) effects as they relate to celebrity endorsements. Across multiple studies in emerging markets, the authors show that consumers’ evaluations depend on the match between (1) celebrity CO and consumer CO (termed consumer CO fit), and (2) celebrity CO and brand CO (termed brand CO fit). If there is a trade...

Online firestorms pose severe threats to online brand communities. Any negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has the potential to become an online firestorm, yet not every post does, so finding ways to detect and respond to negative eWOM constitutes a critical managerial priority. The authors develop a comprehensive framework that integrates dif...

A growing reliance on customer reviews prompts firms to develop strategies to encourage customers to post online reviews of their products. However, little research investigates the behavioral consequences of writing a review. The act of sharing personal opinions through reviews is a rewarding experience and makes customers feel socially connected....

This research examines consumers’ general in-store mobile phone use and shopping behavior. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that mobile phone use decreases point-of-purchase sales, but the results of the current study indicate instead that it can increase purchases overall. Using eye-tracking technology in both a field study and a field experiment,...

Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even as companies join social media conversations and generate millions of brand messages, it remains unclear what, how, and when brand messages stand out and prompt sharing by consumers. With a conceptual extension of speech act theory, this study offers a...

The loss of a sense of humanness that stems from increasing mechanization, automation, and digitization gives firms an impetus to develop effective ways to humanize products. On the basis of knowledge activation theory, this article systematically investigates a novel humanization approach: the use of typefaces that appear to be handwritten. Across...

This article develops a decision-making framework that highlights how display of numeric attribute information (e.g., display of calorie information) and shoppers' goals (i.e., having a diet focus vs. a taste focus) jointly influence shoppers' choices and preferences. Across two sets of studies, including a field study involving the launch of a new...

Sales induced through price promotions depend heavily on discount depth, so firms createmechanisms to influence perceptions of discount depth. Typically, consumers compute discount depth as the difference between the sale price and the original price, with this difference compared against the original price. But thus far, no research has examined t...

The pace of retail evolution has increased dramatically, with the spread of the Internet and as consumers have become more empowered by mobile phones and smart devices. This article outlines significant retail innovations that reveal how retailers and retailing have evolved in the past several decades. In the same spirit, the authors discuss how th...

To develop the knowledge and skill sets of channel partner firms, manufacturers increasingly introduce learning programs as part of their relationship management strategies. However, the engagement of channel partners in these programs tends to be low. The current research, conducted in collaboration with a Fortune 100 information technology compan...

This article studies the impact of shopping at the warehouse club format on households' purchases of packaged food for the home. In addition to low prices, this format has several unique characteristics that can influence packaged food purchases. The empirical analysis uses a combination of households' longitudinal grocery purchase information, ric...

Building a foundation of marketing theory requires developing effective ways to aggregate research results. Meta-analyses that accumulate knowledge within a research domain is an important means for summarizing research findings and increasingly is being conducted in various substantive marketing domains. Moderator analysis and structural models us...

Providing end consumers with the ability to return products is an important part of a retailer’s service offering. While research in reverse logistics has explored the movement of returned merchandise upstream, little research examines the relational implications of returned merchandise in the business-to-business (B2B) context. This research explo...

Although consumers do not usually take kindly to price increases, their perceptions of fairness of price increases are contingent on relevant factors. This study investigates consumers' perceptions of the fairness of retail price increase by a domestic versus a foreign brand, as moderated by consumers' ethnocentricity, bias toward inferring a profi...

Despite cautionary advice against it, delighting consumers by offering them pleasant surprises is widely advocated. In this paper, using a low-price guarantee context, we show that retailers’ attempts to use surprise gains to delight consumers might lead to subpar outcomes, if a countervailing cognition such as suspicion of retailer opportunism dom...

Firms and academics recognize the importance of creating an engaged customer base, though an in-depth understanding of how to achieve it is limited. This article proposes that firms that use consciousness as a foundational philosophy can create a more engaging and meaningful customer experience. A retailer or service provider with foundations in co...

Retailers have embraced a variety of technologies to engage their customers. This article focuses on " The Future of Retailing " by highlighting five key areas that are moving the field forward: (1) technology and tools to facilitate decision making, (2) visual display and merchandise offer decisions, (3) consumption and engagement, (4) big data co...

Dhruv Grewal (Ph.D. Virginia Tech) is the Toyota chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a professor of Marketing at Babson College. His research and teaching interests focus on direct marketing/e-business, retailing, global marketing, pricing, and value-based marketing strategies. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as Journa...

Dhruv Grewal (PhD, Virginia Tech) is the Toyota Chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and a Professor of Marketing at Babson College. His research and teaching interests focus on direct marketing/e-business, retailing, global marketing, pricing, and value-based marketing strategies. He has published over 100 articles in journals such as Journal...

Playing music in stores is very common. Music exerts an influence on how people behave (Milliman 1982, 1986), how they perceive the passage of time (Yalch and Spangenberg 1990, 2000), and how they exert an influence on what customers select from an assortment (North et al. 1999). Based on a meta-analysis of 32 research studies on the effects of mus...

Deciphering consumers' sentiment expressions from big data (e.g., online reviews) has become a managerial priority to monitor product and service evaluations. However, sentiment analysis, the process of automatically distilling sentiment from text, provides little insight regarding the language granularities beyond the use of positive and negative...

The authors propose that price transparency plays an important role in customers’ judgments of whether prices offered by sellers are fair. Cognitive fairness judgments require a certain amount of information processing, so more information and transparency about prices should affect the outcome of fairness judgments. The greater the price transpare...

Control is a frequently discussed human characteristic that is often expressed as an individual’s need to showcase his/her competence, superiority, and mastery over an individual, a group of people, or the environment (White 1959). Control has been examined extensively in the psychology literature, yet marketing research has yet to examine the role...

Technology is rapidly changing the nature of service, customers’ service frontline experiences, and customers’ relationships with service providers. Based on the prediction that in the marketplace of 2025, technology (e.g., service-providing humanoid robots) will be melded into numerous service experiences, this article spotlights technology’s abil...

Mobile advertising allows retailers, service providers, and manufacturers to provide consumers with increasingly relevant offers. The success of such campaigns depends on an ever better understanding of environmental, consumer, and technological context variables; a strong focus on advertising goals; accounting for market factors related to the nat...

Academic theory and marketing practice have both grappled with the problem of assessing marketing performance, either in terms of effectiveness of marketing strategies and/or the efficiency of marketing operations. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is an important tool for the assessment of marketing efficiency, or the relation between marketing inpu...

The last decade has fundamentally changed the face of retailing. The genesis has been increased customer fragmentation, enabling technologies such as the internet and increased competition. In this era of “hypercompetition,” retailers need to have a better understanding of the performance of individual stores so they can more accurately plan their...

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate personalized communications through digital media, which include display, search, social and mobile communications. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the literature pertaining to different digital mediums, the authors explore how different factors influence consumers’ responses to personalized commun...

Engaging customers: the wheel of social media engagement The top priority of every firm is, or should be, to use the power of social media to engage customers. The abilities that social media provide firms, to target and participate in dynamic conversations with individual customers, means that the return on investments in social media efforts can...

Issues in evaluating marketing performance and devising appropriate metrics for measurement have taken center stage in marketing thought and practice in recent years. We propose an empirical model that enables a multinational enterprise (MNE) to assess the marketing performance of its subsidiaries, taking into explicit consideration the fact that t...

This research proposes and tests a framework to understand how one type of low-scope cue, a guarantee, impacts consumer’s evaluations as a function of the retailer’s reputation (high-scope cue). By examining the joint role of cue typicality and the high-scope cue’s valence, this research provides a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of...

The concept of adaptation level theory supports the notion that consumers judge or evaluate price comparatively (Monroe 1990). Consumers are frequently presented with a higher merchant-supplied reference price to compare with a lower advertised selling price (Grewal, Monroe and Krishnan 1998). Research on comparative price advertising has tradition...