93 Chapter 5 Practical implications The central aim of this dissertation was to gain further insights into present-day impulse buying and its underlying mechanisms. Therefore, we studied the effects of three types of contemporary media cues on impulse buying urges and behaviors, and the role of three self-inference processes relevant to the possible effects. The outcomes contain practical relevance for, among other stakeholders, traditional retailers, socially responsible entrepreneurs, consumers, and the environment. These implications are discussed below. Furthermore, we address a short but important note on ethical considerations in research on impulse buying considering its consequences for the various stakeholders. Traditional retailers First, this dissertation provides practical contributions for traditional retailers and the marketers and advertisers with whom they work. In Chapter 2, we showed with field-experiments that interactivity may lead to the urge to impulsively visit and buy from the physical store, depending on whether feelings of self-agency are fueled. Practitioners, therefore, could aim to increase feelings of self-agency in their target group if they wish to amplify the urge to buy impulsively. One way to accomplish this is to implement interactive screens in physical surroundings. In order to elicits feelings of self-agency, these screens should contain high interactivity levels, which can be accomplished by combining the three characteristics of interactivity (Liu and Shrum’s, 2002): 1) active control, for example by creating a feature that makes it possible to swipe through a collection and zoom in on the displayed items; 2) two-way communication, for example by making it possible for users to like products and comment on them, preferably followed by a short response on the screen; and 3) synchronicity, by making sure that the screen responds immediately after a user’s interaction. Previous studies on interactivity have mainly focused on online environments (e.g., Yim et al., 2017; Hu and Wise, 2021). Our study on the effects of interactivity levels in an offline environment is relevant to practitioners who operate in the physical world. Furthermore, traditional retailers can arguably benefit from the insights provided in Chapter 3 of this dissertation. There, we showed that advertisements on retailers’ CSR initiatives can enhance impulse buying behavior. This might stimulate traditional retailers to invest in socially responsible initiatives and empower them to compete based on their prosocial commitments, rather than solely on factors like price. Insights into media cues that enlarge impulse buying (urges) are relevant to traditional retailers, since these are increasingly dependent on impulse visits and purchases (Mehra et al., 2017). Enhancing impulse buying may help them to compete with (online) giants, potentially preventing uniformity and vacancies in the shopping areas. Socially responsible entrepreneurs Second, this dissertation provides practical contributions for socially responsible entrepreneurs. In Chapter 3, we showed that socially responsible companies that aim to increase impulse buying can better use other-benefit focused (versus
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