Master’s Thesis Marketing

Customer behavior is a very important subject in retail marketing. Understanding your customers will allow you to predict and affect purchases a customer does. By influencing the shopping behavior of a customer, retailers can make more money out of customers. Influencing a customer in the wrong way can make a customer spend less or even damage your company by getting a bad image for example. Employee-customer interaction is an often studied subject for a long time. In particular subjects as customer loyalty and the perceptions of customers about service quality. New studies in neuro-economics investigate the effects of the interaction between employees with certain characteristics and intentions and customers. I will investigate if a different orientation of the employee causes a difference in the willingness to buy of a customer. Most of the academics do not focus their study at “the timing of approach effect”, what means that they do not consider the timing of approaching a customer as an important factor of employee-customer interaction. I believe the timing of approaching is an important factor in the employee-customer interaction. The timing of approach might be of an influence on the willingness to buy of a customer. Therefore I will investigate the direct effect of time of approaching a customer on the willingness to buy of the customer. As a customer you will be contacted by an employee if you enter a store. Every customer is different and so the employee can have different effects on the willingness to buy of customers. In which way the employee can be of an influence on a customer depends on the autonomy of that customer. Some customers might be willing to get more help or advice from an employee than other customers. In my research I will investigate whether the preferred autonomy of a customer affects the direct effect of time of approach and the orientation of employees on willingness to buy.