• Online Trust: A Stakeholder Perspective, Concepts, Implications, and Future Directions

    Shankar_Urban_Sultan_JSIS_2002

    by Venkatesh Shankar, Glen L. Urban, Fareena Sultan

    This article was published in Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 11 (2002), 325-344.

    Online trust is important in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-business.  Consumers and businesses, feeling the pressure of economic downturn and terrorism, increasingly look to buy from and do business with organizations with the most trusted Web sites and electronic networks.  Companies’ perception of online trust has steadily evolved from being a construct involving security and privacy issues on the Internet to a multidimensional, complex construct that includes reliability/credibility, emotional comfort and quality for multiple stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, distributors and regulators, in addition to customers.  Further, trust online spans the end-to-end aspects of e-business rather than being just based on the electronic storefront.  Based on a review of selected studies, we propose a stakeholder theory of trust, articulate a broad conceptual framework of online trust including its underlying elements, antecedents, and consequences, and propose some promising future research avenues in online trust.  This paper will help information systems professionals better understand the online trust perspectives of multiple stakeholders, the antecedents and consequences, thereby enabling them to build more trustworthy Web sites.

  • Cross-Category Effects of Aisle and Display Placements: A Spatial Modeling Approach and Insights

    Bezawada_Balachander_Kannan_Shankar_JM_2009

    by Ram Bezawada, S. Balachander, P.K. Kannan, and Venkatesh Shankar

    published in the Journal of Marketing, 73 (May 2009), 99-117.

    Amid growing competition, retailers are increasingly interested in more effective aisle and display management strategies. These strategies involve placements of product categories in aisles and displays within each store to facilitate greater sales affinity (demand attraction) between categories to improve the store’s share of the customer wallet. We investigate the effects of aisle and display placements on the sales affinities between categories. We develop a spatial model of brand sales that allows for asymmetric store-specific affinity effects between two or more categories, while controlling for the effects of traditional merchandising and marketing mix variables, such as price, feature and display. We estimate the model on aggregate store-level data for regular cola and regular potato chip categories for a major retail chain, using hierarchical Bayesian methods. We show the usefulness and extension potential of the model through simulation of aisle placements for a third category. Our results show that aisle and display placements have significant and sizeable asymmetric effects on cross-category sales affinities comparable to those influenced by marketing mix variables. Retail managers can use our detailed store-level model and insights to develop customized aisle and display management for their individual stores.

    Bezawada_Balachander_Kannan_Shankar_JM_2009

  • Store Shelf Strategy

    The effect of aisle adjacency and display of one product category on the sales of another.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZca5-bkKYw