Investigating the impact of nudging on customers’ behavior : A retail store experiment with IoT devices

Sammanfattning: Between 4000-10 000 ads each day every day. That is how many ads we as customers are exposed to individually, each and every day. To reach a higher efficiency in marketing, marketing managers and store owners nowadays aiming to increase the customer satisfaction by striving to understand the customer behavior and their decisioning-making. For the aim of this thesis, we investigated if coloring cues in the retail environment had an impact on customers’ behavior in a specific retail store environment. This experiment was taken place in a small town within Sweden, named Karlstad. The retail store belongs to the electronic sector and the participants included in the experiment were randomly visiting customers of this electronical retail store. In the experiment we used IoT devices from Texas Instruments, a sensor device, called CC2650, enabled us to collect data from interactions by customers and products. In our experiment we compared three periods of data with the help from the analysis method of one-way ANOVA. The result was showing that there is a significant variance between at least two of our three periods of measurements, and by the results of this thesis we could reject the Null Hypothesis (H0). As the H0, were telling that there would not be any differences between any of the three measured periods of time. Further, with insights from our one-way ANOVA, we could determine with help from a complementary analysis method, the Tukey’s HSD, we could point out which periods that were significant different from one another. This made us come into conclusions that there is a possibility to predict the customer behavior and the customer’s Need for Touch (NFT), a part of the nudging theory, and can give the marketing managers and store owners in retail an increase of understanding of the customer’s behavior. Future research could look into how customer’s behavior can change within different type of retail stores, and also if coloring cues in retail stores within bigger cities will have another impact on customer’s behavior.