Authors: Emma Juaneda-Ayensa, Ana Mosquera and Yolanda Sierra Murillo

The Organizational Psychology specialty section of Frontiers in Psychology is proud to launch the Most Impactful Article Award. This recognition will be granted annually to a paper published 5 years prior, among the articles that had the greatest impact on the field in terms of views, downloads, and citations, and carefully selected by the Specialty Chief Editor.

This year’s award goes to Omnichannel Customer Behavior: Key Drivers of Technology Acceptance and Use and Their Effects on Purchase Intention

Since its launch five years ago, the Organizational Psychology Speciality Section published 1,422 articles, including a high of 627 published articles in 2020 with a steady rise in our citation counts and our impact metrics.

We caught up with authors Emma Juaneda-Ayensa, Ana Mosquera and Yolanda Sierra Murillo to delve deeper into the growing success of omnichannel marketing, the impact of COVID-19 on consumer behavior and the future focus of research in the field.

What makes you passionate about consumer behavior and omnichannel marketing as a topic?

Hyper-connectivity has been the enabler of omnichannel marketing. When we started researching this topic in 2015, omnichannel strategy was the future of distribution and commercial communication now it’s the present.

Can you name two areas of research that you are paying particular attention to?

Projects aimed at strengthening local trade or promoting more sustainable behavior by citizens stand out. How should we respond  to the weakening competitive position of small businesses due to the strong digital commerce capabilities of large companies? The pandemic and the successive closures of stores have led to the definitive closure of many businesses and an uncertain outlook for those that remain open. We are researching new proposals that allow local retail to reinvent itself and thus contribute to the development of living cities that maintain the territorial and cultural diversity that characterizes them.

Another key research area are new technologies for the promotion of pro-social behavior. It is quite evident that we are at a crucial moment for the continuity of the planet and that everyone's future will depend on making changes in the current forms of production and consumption. At this point we are working to identify how technology can favor this behavioral change.

What has been the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on  your area of research?

The pandemic has brought to light the weakness of our current development model and the vulnerability of our society's balance, making it clear that we need to seriously rethink the future and implement sustainability strategies.

Nowadays the digitalization of organizations has taken a leap in time, normalizing the use of technology for activities and tasks in our daily lives that we were previously more reluctant to do. This presents us with new areas of omnichannel development that would have required more time and that social distance and the risk of contagion have propelled.

What future directions do you envisage for the field?

New forms of distribution and communication: new social media and in general a greater weight of online channels. The smartphone will continue to be a fundamental gadget in a large part of our daily activities, especially in commerce.

Thanks to technologies integrated into smartphones such as Bluetooth or NFC, shopping in physical shops will become simpler and easier. Establishments are already being tested where, through the shop's app, customers can buy products by simply scanning them and, once they have finished their journey, the purchase is ready to take away, avoiding queues and eliminating paper expenses, as the company sends the digital receipt to the app. However, the human factor must not be forgotten in this digitalization process.