5. Discussion and conclusion
Drawing upon Table 3, companies’ smart retailing strategies might be placed on a Cartesian system x y, considering x the level of influence of the technology on selling activities and y the level of influence on the organizational process (Fig. 1).
Since none of the investigated companies are actually reaching a strong influence on all the components of smart retailing, we might assume that smart retailing is suitable but not yet adopted, due to the lack of smart technologies influencing (improving) selling activities and organizational process. Indeed, only one company is investing towards the introduction of technologies supporting a smart process, achieving so far, a strong impact on two of the components of smart retailing. Indeed, the adopted technologies strongly influence different factors, but not simultaneously, thus retailing might be smart with a technology able to influence all of them at the same time.
A noteworthy result emerges in the organizational processes section, which represents the feature that is more affected by the actual smart technologies. Indeed, when introducing a technological change in organizations there is a strong (both positive and negative) effect on internal processes, necessary skills, and relationships between people. This change might be further suffered or totally managed by the organization, accordingly to the organizational processes trying to recover both static and dynamic consistency.
Moreover, this study also confirms that although smart technologies are changing consumer-seller interaction (Pantano and Gandini, 2017; Pantano and Verteramo, 2017), sellers still influence consumers and their emotional involvement with the product and the store. This leads to the idea that in the luxury sector, smart technologies should strengthen the (human) relationship between customers and salespeople, which requires a different involvement when compared with other sectors such grocery (Bian and Forsythe, 2012; Dion and Arnould, 2011; Joy et al., 2014; Keller, 2009; Wang et al., 2008).
