Although it appears increasingly important yet potentially challenging to attract customers to physical stores, location-based messaging, i.e., delivering mobile phone messages using data about the recipient's location when that recipient is near the sender, has been said to enable such attraction. Still, existing studies offer very limited insight into which particular location-based persuasion approach retailers should use. Drawing on persuasion theory, this exploratory study aims to investigate and compare the potential of two discrepant persuasion techniques (scarcity and social proof) to influence customers' experiences and thereby stimulate them to visit the retailer's physical store. A factorial survey design was applied to test the research model. Data were collected from a sample of actual customers of a Dutch fashion retailer (n = 579). The results suggest that scarcity is a more effective persuasion technique in the studied context than social proof; scarcity-focused messages appear to be experienced as more informative, more entertaining and less irritating, seem to be valued more because of this, and are thus more likely to incline customers to visit the store. We discuss these findings and their implications for theory as well as for practice.
MULTIFILE
More and more non-Western brands and designers entering the fashion world introducing new values, narratives and aesthetics into a dominant Western Fashion discourse deeply intertwined with notions of conceptualism, modernism and postmodernism. In a moment of history where we are facing a failing fashion system, these new voices are introducing new values and new imaginations that try to transform the system into a more inclusive, fair and decentred discipline. Also, on an academic level transnational and decolonial theories are proposing new and fresh lenses on how to critically re-think the Eurocentric Fashion system using new terminologies as de-linking, precedence and aesthesis and the pluri-versal. Do these new perspectives give us the tools to redefine and modify the Western definitions of fashion into a more inclusive and alternative system?
