Getting the Most from Omnichannel Management Strategy

In recent years scholars and practitioners have suggested omnichannel management as the best approach to reach and engage the customer in the buying journey. Traditional literature on distribution channels has focused on the co-operation and mostly on conflicts and competition among a company’s direct and indirect distribution channels (Frazier, 1983; Gaski, 1984; Coughlan et al., 2006). More recently, literature on marketing channels has debated the need for a multi-channel approach based on separated offline and online channels (Neslin et al., 2006). At present, the prevailing focus is on an omnichannel management strategy intended as the synergetic and integrated management of the numerous available channels – online and offline - and customer touchpoints to optimize the customer experience and channels’ performance. An effective omnichannel strategy lets the consumers use channels seamlessly and interchangeably and experience the channels uniquely (Verhoef et al., 2015). Most of the literature refers to omnichannel management as a strategy to increase customer experience and customer loyalty, thus focusing on omnichannel management and marketing strategy. A few research refers to the study of the interplay between omnichannel management and operations and logistics management (Marchet et al., 2018). The goal of this paper is to understand at which conditions a company can get the most from an omnichannel management strategy both at marketing and sales level and at the operations and logistics one. In other words, the paper faces the question concerning the conditions at which the implementation of integrated online and offline channel strategy by the introduction of the e-commerce to the traditional sales channels lets the company get benefits in terms of the improvement in marketing and supply chain management. The first section of the article reports on both the Marketing and Supply chain literature debating on the reasons, benefits and risks associated with the adoption of the omnichannel strategy with a specific focus on companies that decide to add the digital channel (i.e. e-commerce) to their off-line ones. On the basis of the literature review and of a Delphi study conducted between May and December 2017 we developed research hypotheses and a related framework that considers two variables as impacting on the value of an omnichannel strategy: the level of value density (high, low) and the main (if not unique) distribution channel typology (direct, indirect).