Abstract
As information technology continues to provide a platform for any business willing to engage in diverse channels, it has ushered in a continuous evolution of ways to attract and maintain a given customer base. One of the latest trends seen in the retailing industry is the implementation of an omnichannel business strategy. As a result, the number of businesses now implementing such a strategy has led to a lack of differentiation amongst competitors. Therefore, it is no surprise that omnichannel retailers have had to rethink and acquire a new competitive advantage through the exploration of new and innovative strategic activities. Prior work on services has shown gamification to be a successful strategy in enhancing customer loyalty, promoting positive word-of-mouth, and enhancing greater engagement with the offered service. Also, offering hedonic values (one of gamification’s main premises) has been an effective strategy for engaging customers as well as promoting repeat purchase intentions. Despite this, the potential effects of gamification within an omnichannel setting is not yet explored, and thus the rationale of this study. In exploring this gap, we employed means-end chain theory as a basis in which to discover the potential of gamification. Additionally, as gamification is a novel method in omnichannel research, this paper strived to explore the moderating effect of the novelty-seeking traits and unobserved heterogeneous behaviors of consumers. This research was based on 440 valid questionnaires in a survey dataset from Amazon M-Turk. The results provided strong evidence of the underlying proposition within the research models. Specifically, this study showed that gamification could be a potential unique feature used for engaging consumers onto one’s platform, especially consumers with a novelty-seeking trait. We did, however, find that this finding does not apply to the case for all consumers. Therefore, the implication of this research suggests to practitioners that its implementation should be approached through an opt-in rather than a compulsory option.
Highlights
With the ever-expanded capabilities of computer-mediated technologies, many companies have adapted their retailing to fit the instant gratification expected from younger consumers
In order to explore gamification within an omnichannel setting, we propose the following research questions as a way to lead the objectives of this study: (1) Is gamification a viable tool for repeat purchase intention within the setting of omnichannel retailing? (2) To what extent does novelty-seeking have an influence on omnichannel consumers’ repurchase intention? (3) Do the relationships of hedonic value, gamification, repeat purchase intention, and novelty-seeking differ when unobserved heterogeneity is introduced within the sample?
We explored in detail hedonic values infused with gamified features while using novelty-seeking as a moderating effect on repurchase intention within an omnichannel setting
Summary
With the ever-expanded capabilities of computer-mediated technologies, many companies have adapted their retailing to fit the instant gratification expected from younger consumers. To compete with megasized firms such as Amazon and eBay, omnichannel retailing ventures have had to acquire a competitive advantage whereby scale is replaced with computer-mediated intelligence as the primary strategy. For a couple of decades the prevailing logic in retailing research has seen utilitarian and hedonic values investigated extensively, with utilitarian value shown to be more dominant in users’ purchasing behavior (i.e., Overby and Lee, 2006; Chiu et al, 2014). A recent trend in business (Suh et al, 2017) and services have shown gamified experiences (ones directly linked to hedonic usage patterns) attempt to convert utilitarian mechanics into more hedonically oriented ones (Hamari, 2013). With utilitarian values well-established, attempts to delve deeper into the aspects of hedonic usage patterns that OCCs face, could be of great value
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