35 Chapter 2 to (impulsive) purchases and vice versa, it is interesting for interactive marketing practitioners to explicitly make this distinction. It is relevant to know that interactive screens in store-windows could increase the number of people who visit their store spontaneously and buy something there impulsively, depending on whether feelings of self-agency are nourished. This insight is important as physical stores are increasingly dependent on impulse visits and impulse purchases (Mehra et al., 2017). Interactive screens are already used in physical stores (Pantano, 2016). However, except for one qualitative study that suggests that interactive screens could strengthen physical stores› competitive position (Pantano, 2016), no research was conducted on the actual effects of these kinds of screens. The use of interactive screens in storefronts of high-end clothing stores could be beneficial for retailers if the screens stimulate a sense of self-agency with the user, resulting in impulse visits and impulse purchases. Limitations and Future Research Directions Although this study contributed to the literature and practice in multiple ways, it entails some critical limitations. First, it evaluates urges rather than actual behaviors. Measuring impulse behavior is challenging as it is difficult to observe whether a behavior is impulsive. Studies on impulse-buying behavior (e.g., Mohan et al., 2013) often approach people who already bought something and then afterward ask if these purchases were planned (versus unplanned) and whether or not the purchase process was accompanied by a sudden strong urge or desire to buy the product. The disadvantage of this method is that it possibly leads to incorrect answers of the respondents since they are likely to justify their behavior (e.g., James and Rentsch, 2004) by, for example, falsely telling themselves and others they were already planning to buy the purchased item that was actually bought impulsively. Asking people about urges and desires can also be criticized when those urges have already been fulfilled with the product’s purchase. We questioned participants just before a possible impulsive action was taken and asked about their current urges, making the results more valid. However, the consequences were that we could not observe their visiting and buying behavior afterward, as we had already made the participants aware of their urges, which arguably interferes with acting impulsively. Therefore, future research should focus on developing a new method to measure impulse-buying behavior. It would be also interesting to study the effect of online interactivity versus offline interactivity, to establish their relative effects on impulse urges and impulse behavior. A second limitation of this study is the forced usage of the screens. In addition to the practical issue of needing enough passers-by to interact with the screen, we asked participants to use the screen to counter self-selection. External validity can be improved when passers-by are not explicitly asked to use the screen. Without forced usage, it is likely that more information-seeking passers-by would have used the screen (Qin, 2020), which may have affected the outcomes of the experiments. Future studies should consider only addressing passers-by who use interactive screens voluntarily, as this is a more natural shopping situation. Nevertheless, since this study only used field experiments, the external validity is relatively high (in comparison to lab experiments); the experiments were conducted in a real-life shopping street, the interactive screen was placed in an actual shop, and all partic-
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