Achieving Sustainable Business Models in Cosmetics Brick-and-Mortar Retail by Accentuating Customer Experience Management and Differentiation
Sise, Abdoulie (2020)
Lataukset:
Sise, Abdoulie
2020
All rights reserved. This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020060216130
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020060216130
Tiivistelmä
As consumers are gradually leaning towards e-commerce due to its practicality and swiftness -when compared to traditional retailers; is there a future for brick-and-mortar1 businesses? (Stasik, 2019) Does the beauty industry or -more accurately their consumers; shift towards a similar behavior model? In some countries, this phenomenon has already occurred, and cosmetic brands have begun to offer additional value on their e-commerce channels for example in the shape of ‘how-to’ video tutorials or utilizing their social media to show how a certain product would look on different complexions. Employing theory on consumer behavior put forth by Solomon et al, (2013) among others as a foundation with Customer Experience Management Rebooted by Walden (2017), the ideas were juxtaposed with e-commerce literature. Employing the above-mentioned research as an outline, this thesis will inspect how the cosmetics retailers in Finland have adapted to the rise of e-commerce. Additionally, this thesis uses data from numerous journals -which could be pertinent for the topic; as it aids the researcher in grasping the multiple aspects which could influence the buying behavior of cosmetics users. The results indicate that e-commerce does not pose an imminent threat to bricks-and-mortars due to the strong dependency of customer service in cosmetics retail. However, traditional retailers must emphasize their customer experience management as well as, differentiation from their competitors since online retailers are steadily increasing their grip on the target demographics. To sum up, the findings of the thesis suggests that in the cosmetics industry online retailing is not going to replace traditional brick-and-mortar stores at any rate in the following years yet, simply their presence as a competitor forces the traditional retailers to re-evaluate or alter their business practices in order to stay relevant.