The Role of Smart Technologies in Decision Making: Developing, Supporting and Training Smart Consumers

This comprehensive book examines the impact of smart technologies in consumer's behaviour from a contemporary perspective, blending marketing and retailing along with other disciplines such as psychology, media studies and sociology.

Market forces and technological advancements are making the management of and strategies for innovation more prominent and essential in all functions of business, not least marketing and retailing. Frontiers of marketing are constantly pushed, requiring the development and adjustments of new theories. Prior literature on innovation in marketing has mainly focused on digital marketing strategies and consumer behaviour, while only recently introducing the notion of smart retailing in terms of smart experience and interaction. While these studies provide a basis for defining smart retailing and consumer behaviour in smart retail settings, the concept of smart consumers is still under-investigated. Thus, the smart consumer ― consumers making extensive use of smart technologies in all steps of their shopping behaviour and experience of the store (both offline and online) ― is emerging as a promising area for future marketing and retailing studies.

The chapters in this edited volume seek to understand the effect of innovation in consumer behaviour by proposing original empirical and theoretical contributions, methods, models, tools and case studies that contribute to explain this emergent phenomenon.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Eleonora Pantano is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at University of Bristol, UK. Her research activities mainly relate to the development of new customer solutions and retail management strategies, with emphasis on the role of new technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

Francesca Serravalle is Assistant Professor in Business Management at University of Turin, Italy. Her research activities mainly relate to new technologies in retailing, with emphasis on augmented reality in an omnichannel retailing.