••• entrepreneurship research
Female mentors and female mentees are a winning business combination
A study from the University of Notre Dame, Texas A&M, University of Chicago and London School of Economics recommends a simple adjustment to training systems to give women in business a better shot at success: pair female mentors with female entrepreneurs.
The Marketing Science article, “Breaking the glass ceiling: Empowering female entrepreneurs through female mentors,” reports on findings from a field experiment conducted in Kampala, Uganda, with 930 entrepreneurs, 40 percent of whom were women.
The entrepreneurs were randomly matched with a female mentor, a male mentor or no mentor. Recruited by the organization Grow Movement and based all over the world, the mentors worked for several months remotely with the entrepreneurs through videoconferencing, phone calls, texts and shared documents.
A follow-up study two years later showed that businesswomen in emerging markets benefitted significantly more from having a female as opposed to a male mentor. Why? The female mentors proved to be more positive and social in their interactions with the female entrepreneurs – suggesting they were more engaged. The women paired with female mentors learned to build better customer relationships, such as by reaching out post-purchase to ask about their customers’ experience and what could be improved.
Sales and profits of female entrepreneurs guided by female mentors increased by, on average, 32 percent and 31 percent compared with the control group, whereas female entrepreneurs who were mentored by men did not significantly improve their sales and profits.
••• shopper insights
For self-checkout, change ‘have to’ to ‘get to’
One way to win over customers who are skeptical about self-checkout lanes may be to add a sense of agency to the process, according to studies conducted by researchers from Drexel University.
As reported in a Journal of Business Research article, “Feeling rewarded and entitled to be served: Understanding the influence of self- versus regular checkout on customer loyalty,” researchers from Drexel’s LeBow College of Business looked at how self-checkout systems in grocery stores influence customer loyalty compared to regular checkout systems.
Noting that loyalty can be somewhat eroded among self-checkout users, the authors found that encouraging study participants to associate the extra effort involved in self-checkout with a feeling of achievement can mitigate the damage to feelings of loyalty.
Granted, it would take a deft touch to spin something that for many consumers is just another example of corporate cost-cutting (more self-checkouts = lower labor outlays) as a time-saving bit of empowerment, but using signage to emphasize the proactive, easy-in/easy-out aspects could pay off, especially as other forms of frictionless or contactless checkout like scan-and-go and smart carts become more widely used.
“We found that when customers were encouraged to think of the extra effort involved in self-checkout as a rewarding experience, their perceived loyalty to the store was similar to those of regular checkout shoppers,” says co-author Yanliu Huang.