Should retailers harmonize marketing variables across their distribution channels? An investigation of cross-channel effects in multi-channel retailing

Retailers with more than one channel of distribution have to decide whether marketing variables such as conveyed image, price, and assortment should be harmonized across channels. This article presents an integrative model and survey results that shed light on this question; its focus is on stores, online shops, and catalogs. The results show that harmonization of marketing variables has advantages and disadvantages: on the one hand, it correlates positively with overall customer loyalty and cross-channel customer retention, i.e., one channel causes more sales in other channels. On the other hand, it also correlates positively with cannibalization within the distribution system. This suggests that general recommendations strictly favoring or disfavoring harmonization do not account sufficiently for the complexity of the problem and retailer heterogeneity.