Silvia Bellini

Retail Micro-Marketing Strategies and Competition

The goal of this paper is to open the debate about the effect of customer specific retail marketing on competition. Segmentation and targeting based on loyalty card information affects horizontal and vertical relationships. Few retailers can take advantage of the power connected to the ownership of customer information. Consumers benefit from a more targeted approach to value creation but the distribution of such value varies widely, as a consequence of micro-targeting. A second goal is to test a new way of conducting joint research with practitioners. An online community was set up for the discussion of micro-marketing related issues. Online, the authors have been able to test the hypothesis and deliver the survey questionnaire to participating retailers who, in turn, can access results through the community website: www.partnership4loyalty.com.

Building customer loyalty in retailing: not all levers are created equal

This research examines the determinants in building and maintaining customer loyalty in grocery retailing. The first part introduces a distinction between traditional, ‘mass’ levers such as range and price, and relational, ‘targeted’ levers based on individual customer information. The second part focuses on the role ofthese two sets of levers for differentiation, that is, to what extent they are perceived by customers as distinctive to a retailer. For the first time, parallel analysis of retailers and consumers is used to obtain a dual perspective on loyalty drivers. Most supermarket chains in Italy today are found to invest marketing resources in the ‘mass’ levers of range and price. They are also starting to use other levers for differentiation, although effectiveness of their attempts varies a great deal and the perception of diversity by customers varies a lot from one banner to another. We also find that relational levers cannot be separated from traditional levers to sustain loyalty, but they clearly play a secondary role. Investment in targeted marketing is no substitute for that in traditional mass loyalty tools such as range and price.

Bambini: conversazioni nelle reti e strategie dei brand. Prime osservazioni e linee di ricerca

Despite the explosion of Snss and the growing interest of brands foron line conversations, analysis on the relationship between consumersand brands in these environments is still insufficient. This is particularlyevident in relation to the presence of children in Snss. Investigation onthe relationship between kids and brands has significant implicationsfor the debate on regulation of marketing messages towards children.The starting point is to assume that social networks introduce a veryimportant change in the scenario opened by web 2.0: the interplaybetween online communication and daily life. The ability to manipulate,create and share messages, brings the contents and objects exchangedinto personal relationships; messages in turn become part of childrensreal life. This paper proposes an initial exploratory research, which wasconducted through direct interviews to children and teachers, focusingon kids perception and ability to recognize brand messages.