Gabriela Balladares Ph.D., tells us about her research process at the Innova Institute and her path towards her doctorate

About her journey and how she started

I started at La Salle for the Ph.D. and little by little I was incorporated in teaching tasks and studying marketing areas. It is a project that started because of the phenomenon of digitalization, especially in the marketing environment. I am an economist and I did my master's degree in management, but my specialization was in marketing. The master's thesis was also on consumer behavior issues, where we found a gap in the literature. 

The literature embarks on the buying process, where existing theories are not able to explain the phenomena that are emerging in reality, or because in the practical part, those who deal with marketing issues are implementing strategies that do not correspond to what exists in the academic literature. 

We saw that there was an opportunity to make original work and contribution. I have worked hand in hand with Professor Chris Kennet and Professor Francesc Miralles, each bringing different expertise. Chris Kennet has expertise in marketing and consumer behavior and Fr. Miralles on "information and Communication Technologies". 

In the end, the work is within this field. The buying process is changing, there are many elements that could explain this behavior, but it is not yet found in the academic literature. 

The process of her research

We saw that consumers when they are shopping in reality are exchanging sources of information, between visiting a physical store and searching on websites. In addition, the irruption of social media is a big player influencing how consumers make their purchasing decisions. What we recorded is that it seemed that this interaction between digital information sources and physical information sources was explaining why consumers perceive certain types of risk. This is a construct that is called perceived risk, but it has been studied in traditional settings, and not necessarily in digital settings. It seemed that the risk perceived by consumers does relate to risk typologies. For example, financial risk: when making a purchase, spending a lot of money and not being satisfied at the end of your purchase or customer journey. However, there were things that were not explained in the literature, and that are still a concern, a consumer risk. 

Now we understand that the digital environment is more dynamic, the buying process becomes more cyclical and dynamic, it is no longer sequential, what was called the marketing funnel, then it was no longer a funnel, it was more dynamic. Consumers go through the consumer journey and talk to more people and include more brands in their consideration set; then they take them out and put them back in. So it brings more dynamism. 

At this point, we had identified this gap and the initial question was: How does digitization and the marketing environment affect this perceived risk? 

To start, we decided to do focus groups. We go to the literature to design this exploratory. We opted for an exploratory because we haven't found the theories. It is not a quantitative hypothesis testing study, but it is something we needed to do, to open a box and see what was going on. Then we came across literature that mentions a group of people who are called "digital natives". These are defined as those born after the 80s, without specifying so much the age, but the behavior and familiarity with all the "gadgets" or devices of the digital era (tablets, phone, computer). In fact, it was at that time when we began to see the shift from computer to cell phone for making purchasing decisions. Consequently, we saw that this profile fit with our undergraduate students. We saw that it was a good opportunity to get information. 

The start of data collection

All the data collection was done in Barcelona, the buyers were people who were making a purchase decision, in this case, they were international students. From there we had some initial data that helped us refine the following research questions. 

Although the thesis is an inductive process, it is also very interactive. A first step was to collect data and then we continued with a second stage. We began to see that there was more to consumers than what seemed obvious. Although they did perceive risks and bought through many channels, we saw that there was a very important social component. Pretending a lot on social networks, we understood that their purchasing decisions were not individual, but something that is shared on social networks, which has a repercussion of acceptance in the group, of feeling judged by what they buy, the brands they buy and how they share it on social networks. Because of this, we decided to move to an interview phase, which is called: In-depth interviews.

We realized in the focus group stage that the purchase process was something defined in time, that is, the purchase decision was not made in one day, but it was a process that took a week or two weeks. That's why we did a longitudinal study. We realized that we had to capture the entire purchase decision to understand what was going on and the decisions they were making. 

We did the second phase of interviews, and asked the students if they knew anyone who was buying a high-involvement tangible product and had not yet purchased it. Students recommended family members, classmates, students from the same university, master's degree people. This was Snowball Sampling; you snowball, asking friends of friends, which is pretty organic. Taking advantage of the volume of students, little by little we did the interviews following the methodology that best suited us, which is called Phenomenology, it is an involvement (not with an expressive number of people) but an involvement in great depth.

We recorded all the interviews, I had the help of an intern, a Master's student who helped me with the focus groups, making the transcripts of the recordings to texts, because it is a large volume of information. 

Together with Dr. Bianca Villar, we used "Nvivo" (an interview processing software), where we put all the data there to organize all the information, with it you can do a codification of the interviews. Here comes the role of the researcher; in qualitative studies you have to be the one who interprets the information. We coded perceptions, concepts and constructs in the first interview when the consumer is thinking of buying a product, to know if perhaps he/she has looked for information, asked for a reference, etc. We made a "before and after" parallel to see how these constructs evolved over time. What we saw is that there were some clearly defined constructs in the literature such as performance risk. This is already explained, it's nothing new, but we codified it. However, there were things that did emerge in the data and they were also coded and we made distinctions between the different data. Once we had collected all the interviews (it takes quite a long time because you don't get all the consumers at the same time, some were already advanced, others were finishing). Finally, we closed this first stage of data and asked the interviewees to complete a consumer diary, however, of the more than twenty people I interviewed, I received 5 diaries, it is really asking a lot of them to keep a diary. 

The process of presenting to the academic community

At this point we started submitting conference papers. With these preliminaries, we started to seek external validation, not only the validation of La Salle but we wanted them to be validated outside. We managed to present the work in international companies, and the one that mattered most to me was EMAC, which is the European conference for marketing issues, it is very specific and high level. That was the first time I presented my work at an international conference. 

Also, we sent our work to GIKA (The Global Innovation and Knowledge Academy and GIKA Conferences), since it was convenient because it was in Spain (Valencia), they accepted it and we presented it. We also found a conference in Greece, the attractive thing is that it was international and marketing. Likewise, we had the opportunity to access some funds from La Caixa called, "The internationalization of digitalization". Just as we had made contact at a conference in Canada, I went to this university for 3 weeks to do publishing opportunities at Laurentian University. All this encouraged us to understand that we have an external validation for the path we had taken for the thesis. 

Shaping  the whole research work.

Then came the work of starting to write the thesis. At that moment you have everything unstructured, the doctoral work of writing the thesis and starting to shape the findings, the contribution - La Salle does the doctoral weeks and the professors help how to embark on the contribution, which is something that is sought after a lot. Once the data analysis was done and we saw that the different types of risk were not perceived in the same way depending on the moment of the purchase process, we understood that risk occurred as a process. In other words, the perception of risk is not like a snapshot at a given moment but a perception that is affected by the information that consumers obtain in their search for information. At the same time, this perceived risk affects the way we seek information and the information affects the perception of risk. So we find this dual effect where one affects the other in a dynamic way. 

What we observed is also that risk, if we understand its nature as a process, is also multidimensional. What we did observe is that there were the classic ones: financial, performance, social risk, but that they occurred as they progressed through the process, i.e. not all of them were perceived at time "one" or at time "five".

When they understood a construct as a process, they used time bracketing to break the process into stages. In our case, we found 5 stages: our risk evolution, what we observed is that the purchase decision occurs when consumers on the one hand feel that the information is sufficient to have the risk (it is never 0 - there was always a level of acceptance), and on the other hand, consumers have had a process of learning, concern and a little bit of fatigue. Of saying, either I'll buy it or I'll pass. 

We had a consumer who was not able to reduce the financial risk. One thing we looked at was where he was getting his money from. Whether it's his money or the parents' money, in this case, it was his money, so he didn't decide to buy while we were doing the study. On the other hand, one of the important findings of the thesis is that there are risks that are particular to the digital age and were not defined in the previous literature. Therefore, our contribution is to classify that type of risk, and to explain it in order to understand how it works in this buying environment.

One fairly obvious risk is to avoid the hassle of returning product: returns, or getting a refund. Another risk was to find biased information, that is, information that was not perceived as honest, that was sponsored by the brand, consumers started to look for reviews, and suddenly they were not so much concerned about the product as they were about the loyalty of the information. 

Lessons Learned

On the one hand, perceived risk is explained in the literature by the dominant quantitative method, which measures risk on a scale of 1-10 at a specific time of purchase and does not take into account that reaching this perception of risk has a previous path. Here, risk is explained as a process, which is affected by the information gathered by consumers in the purchase process. We confirm that perceived risk affects the way consumers make purchase decisions and that, in turn, this risk perception explains why the purchase decision becomes dynamic. It had been said that the purchase process becomes dynamic, but it had not been said why. 

Authors: Gabriela Balladares, Katalina Soto and Blanca Sanahuja