General Positioning and Mission
The mission of the Omer DeSerres Chair of Retailing is to produce and disseminate high-level knowledge in the retail management and service marketing sectors.
To start with, retail management refers to all intermediaries involved in the sale of products and services to end consumers. This field of study includes, but is not limited to, the notion of omni-channels, customer experience, customer service and e-commerce. For its part, service marketing can be briefly defined as the development of marketing strategies for proposals of intangible value, that relies heavily on the application of knowledge and skills.
These sectors have gained in importance over the past 20 years, and have become a prolific source of conceptual innovations over the years. For example, influential notions of omni-channels, customer loyalty, relationship marketing, the customer’s economic value, customer recovery, customer experience and service-driven logic are strongly rooted in retail management and service marketing.
The mission of the Omer DeSerres Chair of Retailing has been established on a highly abstract level in order to transcend the interests of a single individual and to integrate the research of many students, researchers and organizations.
Three aspects of the mission deserve to be highlighted :
- First, the Chair will focus primarily on academic research and, to a lesser extent, on transfer activities (e.g., practitioner journals, media interviews, and training programs for managers and executives). The Chair plans to allocate approximately 80% of its resources to academic research and 20% to transfer activities.
- Next, the Chair’s long-term goal is to create an internationally renowned center of excellence in retail management and services at HEC Montréal. Such an ambitious project can only be achieved if the Chair members regularly publish in quality journals; this commitment to quality will be an integral part of the Chair’s culture.
- Finally, the Chair will concentrate primarily on major axes with potential – two of them are outlined below and the others will be determined based on the members’ interests and it will support these axes through three key strategic activities (see figure below). View the details of these axes and activities.
