An Investigation of Consumer Subjective Knowledge in Frontline Interactions

It is no secret that the consumer journey produces retail consumers who have varying levels of subjective knowledge about a purchase prior to a retail interaction. This observation leads to a common conclusion that the need for frontline employees (FLEs) in retail environments is diminishing. Nevertheless, retailers invest heavily in staffing and training FLEs. As such, understanding pre-encounter subjective knowledge and how FLEs should address it is critical, yet the topic is largely overlooked in the marketing literature. Thus, we investigate consumer subjective knowledge via an information diagnosticity lens to provide guidance on how subjective knowledge operates when the information in question is scarce/known, tacit/explicit, and specific/general. The results of three experiments reveal consumers can be classified as traditional, well-calibrated, or poorly-calibrated based on their subjective knowledge prior to meeting with an FLE – with each type requiring different FLE approaches to improve both consumers’ willingness to buy and acceptance of FLE recommendations.