The Research On How Rrtail Processes Integrated Impact Retailer Equity

Under the intense retail competition and its serious homogenization, to strengthen theretail brand-building and differentiated operation on the purpose of accumulating andincreasing the retailers’ central brand equity, retailer equity has been the key for them tosucceed in Chinese market. Since the economic situation is not clear nowadays, multi-channelretail is one of the few opportunities for growth, which leads to the fact that the multi-channelretailers have to meet with one significant issue during their business operation, namely, howto develop multi-channel integration strategies to improve the brand effects in multi-channelenvironment, or the retailer equity in other words.In order to provide the customers with satisfactory multi-channel shopping experienceand then the realization of customer retention and growth, the retailers have begun to take themulti-channel integration strategies. However, considering that not all of the multi-channeloperations can increase the brand popularity of the retail enterprise, the lack of integration orits low level in the online and offline retail may cause some negative effects for suchenterprise. Thus, on the basis of these issues and also the insufficient study over themulti-channel integration strategies, this paper will give a further study so as to offer someadvice and help for the retailers to make use of the multi-channel integration strategies inincreasing enterprise benefits.This paper aims to study the impact mechanism produced by the retail process integrationupon the retailer equity in the multi-channel environment. It mainly focuses on the followingtwo aspects:(1) establishing a conceptual model to manifest how the retail process integrationinfluences the retailer equity and verify their different effects in relevant dimensions viaempirical study. With the help of the empirical data, it is discovered that among the five retailprocess integration dimensions, which separately are promotional information integration,product and price information integration and customer service integration have a significantimpact on retailer requity, the product and price information integration has the biggest effectson the retailer equity, while the effects of transaction information is insignificant.(2) explorehow the five retail process integration dimensions utilize effects of the online and offline storeattitudes to influence the retailer equity, and also the mediate on of such attitudes in therelationship of the retail process integration and the whole retailer equity, by introducing twomediator variables separately called online and offline store attitudes in the conceptual modelto manifest how the retail process integration influences the retailer equity.Thus, it is shownthat the online and offline store attitudes completely mediate the effects of the promotionalinformation integration upon the retailer equity; the online and offline store attitudes partlymediate the effects of the product and price information integration and customer serviceintegration upon the retailer equity; the online and offline store attitudes do not mediate theeffects of order fulfillment integration upon the retailer equity.