B2C smart retailing: A consumer-focused value-based analysis of interactions and synergies

- 'Value' is both means of understanding and ends to the smart retailing B2C relationship.
- Underlying contemporary business and consumer motivators shape the relationship.
- Smart retailing 'soft value' manifestations are delineated.
- 'Soft Values' are particular sources of retailers' lasting competitive advantages.
- Smart retailing has become an independent holistic strategic approach.

The paper transcends the simply functional and oligo-dimensional approach to smart retailing, in order to provide a comprehensive, value-based analysis of its B2C relationship. Methodologically, it is a theoretically developed conceptual work, refined through qualitative primary research. Specifically, combining narrative and meta-synthetic literature analyses with interviews it undertakes an extensive theoretical review on the subject and its peripheral and contextual factors; it identifies the value categories and individual elements, which explicitly or implicitly define the smart retailing B2C relationships and synergies; and prescriptively incorporates all into a single, provisional, value-based, multi-dimensional framework for B2C smart retailing. The findings give rise to 'value' as superior means of understanding the smart retailing B2C relationship and as the ultimate ends on both sides of the relationship; both largely consequent to the changing underlying contemporary business and consumer motivators. Additionally, smart retailing 'soft value' manifestations are delineated and proposed as particular sources of retailers' lasting and inimitable competitive advantages; while smart retailing itself is found to have outgrown its traditional role to become a holistic strategic approach to the retailing business.

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