Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A.), Franklin University, 2023, Business Administration

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred a significant retail shift, with consumers turning to online shopping due to safety concerns and lockdowns. Retailers quickly adopted omnichannel strategies, merging online and offline channels to stay relevant and enhance the shopping experience. This research, grounded in innovation diffusion theory, examined the pandemic's influence on customer behavioral intentions regarding omnichannel capabilities. Using a quantitative research approach with a survey in Northwest Arkansas, the study explored the relationship between innovation diffusion attributes and customer omnichannel Buy-Online-Pickup-at-the-Store (BOPS) behavioral intention. A ten-point Likert scale survey was adapted from Kapoor to gather data from 190 respondents online. The respondent's Intention to Use BOPS increased from 36.8% pre-pandemic to 84% post-pandemic. Data was analyzed using Pearson correlation for each characteristic and regression for the combined attribute and customer intention to use BOPS. Notably, relative advantage, compatibility, and observability attributes significantly impacted the model, whereas trialability and complexity lacked significance within the combined model. The findings suggested that customers prioritize buy-Online-Pickup-at-the-Store's relative advantage, compatibility, and observability when making adoption decisions. While complexity and trialability are essential, their significance diminishes when considered with other attributes. This study contributes valuable insights into consumer behavior during crises and the evolving retail landscape post-crisis. These findings can guide strategies for optimizing omnichannel capabilities and enhancing customer adoption.

Committee: Sherry Abernathy (Committee Chair); Tim Reymann (Committee Member); Charles Fenner (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Business Administration; Management; Marketing; Technology

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2016, Leadership and Change

This qualitative study examined a leader's enigmatic decision-making process guiding innovative and complex organizations—organizations that are not able to rely on market research or the precedence of industry emulators for making strategic decisions. Leaders of highly creative organizations regularly make catalytic decisions that have fateful outcomes; their ability to recognize and appropriately adjudicate complex and unpredictable market forces determine the consequences. Such influential choices often require a deep level of intuition with very little research and time to decide. The purpose of this dissertation has been to develop a framework that presents Brand Leadership as a distinct and viable leadership paradigm. A claim that leadership may be best described as a way of being with comprehensive system-thinking capable of fully understanding the context in which he or she leads; the complexity of the organization and the trends of the marketplace. A Representative Case Research study, which included three brand leaders and nine ancillary interviews, was conducted and four unique contributions have been offered: First, while certainly related to marketing, brand is the higher order and requires strategic leadership. Second, the evolving role of the brand leader fulfills certain needs, including that brand leaders see the organization in the eyes of the customer; and that Brand Leadership represents an internal momentum in which customers are at the center of the organization. Third, Brand Leadership ,in fact, should be considered a unique leadership paradigm as it sees the leader's intuition as a quintessential proponent to understanding context of the organization and leading within the context of a larger marketplace. And fourth, Brand Leadership is an untapped educational frontier. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, http:/ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mitch Kusy PhD (Committee Chair); Laura Morgan-Roberts PhD (Committee Member); Roger Blackwell PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Kaplan PhD (Other) Subjects: Marketing