Consumers’ perception of store image of joint venture shopping centres: first-tier versus second-tier cities in China

Studies on consumer behaviour and the modelling of attributes representing store image of shopping centres in the context of a developed country have been the focus of many researchers. In contrast, although China has the largest consumer market in the world, the consumer behaviour and consumption psychology of this enormous market remain relatively unknown due to a previously “close-door” policy as well as a high degree of government intervention within the retail sector. This paper discusses the unique nature and development of the retail industry in China, and formulates a model to represent the store image of joint venture shopping centres, which are the only approved form of direct foreign investment into China's retail sector. Research on store image of shopping centres in the west as well as in China has been applied in the formulation of the model, which consists of 21 attributes. The relative importance of these 21 shopping centre image attributes is subsequently analysed between consumers in a first-tier and a second-tier city in China. By being the first of its kind to reflect on China's retail market and its joint venture shopping centres, and to compare the consumer behaviour within different levels of cities in China, this paper provides both researchers and retailers with a better insight and understanding into the psychology of Chinese consumers, and the retailing business in China.     

The social media response to the rollout of legalized cannabis retail in Ontario,Canada

With Canada becoming the first G20 country to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, there has been increasing interest in the emergence of this new retail market. The research utilizes social media analytics to analyze the public's response to the rollout of the government-controlled cannabis retail stores: Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS). The research analyzes 17,162 tweets mentioning the OCS (@ONCannabisStore) on Twitter in the one-year period following the legalization of recreational cannabis. Using thematic analysis, 19 codes are identified and further categorized under six themes—i.e., consignment, product, retail model, policy, producers, and consumers. The research provides valuable insight into the public's perceptions of the newly legalized cannabis retail market on social media. As a practical implication of the research, key concerns and issues with the initial retail rollout are identified, which provides insight into the evolution of an illegal to legal retail market. The methods can be used by future researchers, policy makers, and emerging cannabis retailers to gather and understand cannabis consumers' opinions on social media. Furthermore, the findings can be leveraged to inform future government policies and decisions around the emergence of this new retail sector.     

Managing the embedded multinational: a business network view

This response welcomes A. Godley and H. Hang's comment on N. Alexander's recent article. It acknowledges those theoretical issues on which there is broad agreement and explores theoretical issues around which debate is likely to focus in the future. Consideration is given to international retailing in the first and second global economies and the problems surrounding the evaluation of longer term trends. It explores the nature of innovation and the international transfer of retail innovation in an international retail firm and market context. Market structural conditions and their impact on international retail activity are considered. Further areas for historically based research are suggested.     

Is online-to-offline customer care support essential for consumer service?

Customer satisfaction is the main pillar for convenient and profitable retailing. The retail sector continuously tried to develop new strategies to improve consumer satisfaction. It is impossible to provide each service directly to the consumer by the retailer. In this direction, the retailer establishes customer care to provide the best service to consumers. Consumer care can provide promotional or prevention services, increasing the consumer's satisfaction level. This study is developed to show the impact of retailers' customer care service for an offline-to-online retailing strategy. The demand is consumer support, advertisement, and selling price dependent. For maintaining consumer service, some free home delivery policies are offered, when consumers ordered more than a certain percentage of the amount. Finally, the total profit of this O2O retailing system is calculated by the classical optimization technique. Some special cases are discussed in the numerical section to prove the impact of customer care services. Numerical results prove that customer care support enhances the profit by 48.20%, whereas investment in the advertisement and home delivery strategy helps the retail industry to earn 44.80% and 16.74% more profit, respectively. Finally, from this study, it is clear that customer care activities are essential to increase the profit of the retailing sector.     

Is the system reliability profitable for retailing and consumer service of a dynamical system under cross-price elasticity of demand?

Retailing strategy is one of the most crucial factors for industries. A proper retailing strategy can help to enhance consumer service and increase the industry's profit. An improved approach to retailing is suggested in this research to deliver superior customer service while maximizing profits in a dynamic system. The study analyzes a retailing strategy for a demand with cross-price elasticity upon the retail price. A product's cross-price elasticity and the system reliability are critical factors in retailing. Understanding the cross-price elasticity of demand between products helps retailers to make pricing decisions that maximize profits by maintaining demand. Imperfect products are produced due to an imperfect production system. The imperfect ones must be adjusted with some costs to make them perfect for better retailing. The system failure rate is crucial for retailing under cross-price elasticity of demand patterns. Production system reliability, cross-price elasticity of demand, and consumer service are all essential factors that can impact a company's success in the market. The production rate is considered time- and system failure rate-dependent. Contradictory to the literature, a dynamical system is proposed for improved retail management, which is solved using the Euler-Lagrange theory. Finally, one can achieve the expected maximum profit for this retail system with optimum selling prices for different products by reducing the system failure rate. Some numerical illustrations with graphical representations are provided to validate the current study. Numerical examples show that applying cross-price elasticity of demand for more than two identical products provides 35% more profit for the retail industry than a single type of product.     

农村超市发展初探

超市近年在大中城市悄然升级并超常规模发展，加上中国入世所带来的国际零售集团步入中国市场，给原本有限的竞争空间雪上加霜。与其在林立成群的城市超市夹缝中寻求生存并发展，还不如把经营触角伸向竞争相对缓和的农村市场，以促进超市持续健康有序发展。     

Transformation of China's energy sector: trends and challenges

The conclusions presented here sum up the contributions in the Special Issue regarding the managing of China's energy sector, particularly regarding the demand and profile of energy as well as the marketization of the sector. Strategic, organizational and policy issues relevant to the main theme are set out. Both demand and supply scenarios for the nation's energy are seen as in flux, as the economy slackens and dependence on imports rises. Unprecedented levels of urban environmental pollution and steady growth of energy consumption in the wake of a rising living standard have brought the issue to headline-prominence as never before. China's rapidly increasing renewable energy will not change its heavy reliance on coal and a lesser extent oil in the coming decade. After decades of transformation, China's energy sector now operates in a domestic market characterized by strong governmental influence and monopolistic state firms. Abroad, China's firms are exposed to heavier market pressure and competition. While the state's policies have succeeded in ensuring energy supplies and propelling China's renewable energy manufacturers into global prominence and opening up domestic market, much room for improvement exists in the competitiveness of the domestic market and domestic energy firms, transparency of pricing and the effectiveness of regulation.     

外商投资我国零售业的动向与思考

未来几年,随着外资进入我国零售业,在企业的设立形式,数量,地域,股权比例等方面的限制陆续取消,我国零售业将会形成外商独资、中外合资等各种经济成份相互竞争的局面。认真解读外商投资零售企业的现状,分析其发展动向,这对保护和发展民族商业、规范我国零售市场具有重要的意义。     

The Outlook for European Grocery Retailing: Competition and Format Development

This article analyses retail trends in the main European countries, and particularly format evolution and competition amongst retailing firms. On the basis of the existence of European retailing landscapes that are sometimes similar without ever being identical, the article analyses the impact of the main factors of change on different national markets. Whilst retail internationalisation and new entrants, commercial policy, legislative environments, technological innovations, consumers and buying behaviour will have a convergence effect on different countries' retail structures, substantial differences will still exist. European retailing in the coming years will probably be characterized by increasingly less marked differences between countries than one finds today, but market segmentation, variety and differentiation of retailing formats and brand names will be stronger within each country.     

The Asian economic recession and retail change: the implications for retailer strategies in Asia

For almost three years the Asian Economic Crisis has been one of the most talked about influences on the retail sector in the region. This paper argues that the economic crisis has hidden or diverted attention away from the underlying changes in retailing that have been proceeding for much longer.A more dynamic and proactive retail sector appears to be evolving, one which is now less of a 'taker' of the strategies of manufacturers and more of a 'setter' of trends in product development and logistics. European and American retailers often appear to be major catalysts in this process, but this is not to say that the Asian retail sector will not develop in its own way, matched to local needs. What does now appear to be clear is that as economies in the region recover, most of their retail sectors will not go back to 'business as usual'.     

Charity Retailing in the United Kingdom: A Managerial Capabilities Perspective

Nonprofit organizations are venturing into commercial activities due to the intense competition for the limited government funds and declining availability of donor funds for third‐sector organizations that address social problems. Charity retailing, a popular choice of commercial activity for nonprofit organization, has filled vacant premises in the high streets of the small towns and suburbs of large cities in the United Kingdom. Successful charity retail operation requires distinctive capabilities necessary to manage organizations' resources in commercial environment. Using 60 in‐depth elite interviews, we introduce the concept of managerial capabilities for charity retailing. Research propositions and management implications are discussed.     

Retail services and firm profit in a dual-channel market

With the rapid development of the Internet, many manufacturers nowadays use online technology to engage in direct sales. The mix of retailing with a direct channel adds a new dimension of competition and complementarity to a product's distribution channels. Our model focuses on the strategic role played by the retail services in a dual-channel competitive market. The manufacturer uses a direct channel as an effective tool to motivate the retailer to improve its retail services and profits from it. While operated by the manufacturer to motivate retailer to perform more effectively from the manufacturer's perspective, the direct channel may not always be detrimental to the retailer because the retailer can obtain a lower wholesale price from the manufacturer and a higher sales volume from the improved retail services. In our research, our results suggest that the improved retail services effectively alleviate the channel competition and conflict and improve the supply chain performance in a competitive market.     

‘The Municipal Store’: Adaptation and Development in the Retail Markets of Nineteenth-Century Urban Lancashire

This essay employs a case study of Lancashire's nineteeth-century retail markets in order to reassess the impact of economic and urban growth on retail forms. By revealing the resilience of markets in a county which experienced some of the most intense industrial and urban development of the period, it challenges those models of retail change which present an inverse relationship between economic and urban change on the one hand, and ‘traditional’ modes of retailing on the other. It examines the ways in which the region's markets responded to the new problems and opportunities generated by their changing physical, economic and social environment, focusing in particular on their management, their trade and their temporal and physical organisation. It reveals how, contrary to undergoing displacement by ‘fixed’ forms of shop retailing, markets adopted some of their characteristics and evolved as modern, profitable, daily, undercover ‘municipal stores’.     

Employment Theory and the Wheel of Retailing: Segmenting the Circle

This article attempts to highlight the transitory nature of the retail labour market and provide a theoretical framework that accounts for the employment changes that have occurred in retailing since the Second World War. Using the concept of cyclicality embodied within the Wheel of Retailing, it identifies how at each stage of the cycle there develops a new dominant form of employment relation. The British grocery sector is taken as an example to illustrate this relationship.     

New logistics technologies in improving customer value in retailing service

Today's business success to a great extent depends on logistics and supply chain performance. The role of logistics has never been as critical as it is today. This paper identifies a series of market trends and technological advances which are likely to affect Croatian retail logistics over the next 10–15 years. The results of the study conducted on the sample of Croatian retailing managers reveal that Croatian retailers have not yet recognized the importance of new logistics technology and that they do not use them sufficiently. Although retail sector is facing significant pressures to offer high level of service, knowledge and skills of their employees and to reduce cost as well, Croatian retailers do not see the opportunity of Internet based technologies to improve the knowledge of their employees as the most important source of the company. They use some Internet technologies mostly in advertising, the process of ordering and all transactions with suppliers, and the communication with other business entities.     

Addressing ethical issues in retailing: a stakeholder perspective

This paper contends that, despite the dominance of the marketing paradigm in retail studies, benefits may be gained from applying stakeholder analysis to retailing. The development of stakeholder theory is outlined, and its problems and shortcomings reviewed. Notwithstanding these, retailing's stakeholders are defined in relation to "best practice". Examples of issues pertaining to stakeholder groups are given. Several ethical issues in retailing are then examined to demonstrate the benefits that accrue from applying a stakeholder approach. It is suggested that such a framework offers a broader perspective, and in particular that rising concern for ethical issues in retailing is better articulated through such a framework. The paper concludes such issues are better addressed when any retail marketing analysis is paralleled with a stakeholder analysis.     

How well do ‘off-price’ retailers satisfy consumers?

Off-price retailing is a new form of discount or low-price retailing that has become prominent in the U. S. during the past decade. In an attempt to satisfy today's quality-and price-conscious consumers, off-price retailers have utilized a marketing strategy of ‘brand and designer names for less’. Based on research assessing consumers' attitudes towards apparel offerings of off-price versus conventional retailers, we suggest that off-price retailers are not yet successful at satisfying consumers' needs and wants in their special niche of the market. We recommend several revised marketing strategies to enable off-price retailers to satisfy consumers better, and thereby maintain their niche in the ever competitive consumer market. We conclude by observing that it is important that consumer-orientated professionals take an advocacy role in encouraging retail institutions such as off-price stores to revise their marketing strategies to serve consumer interests better.     

The changing structure of Hungarian retailing: Prospects for foreign retailers

Since the mid‐1980s many innovations and developments have taken place in Hungarian retailing, notably because of the recognition by the government that weaknesses in the distribution system can be a fundamental handicap to the efficiency of the whole economy. Some of the changes in Hungarian retail organization date back to the two periods of reform in 1968 and the early 1980s. Those reforms which in the retail sector were designed primarily to encourage innovation and diminish the bureaucracy of large organizations are examined, as well as the major factors in the economy which continued to frustrate many of their beneficial effects.

The subsequent effects of deregulation measures since 1985 on retailing are analysed, particularly the main changes which have occurred in the structure of retailing, e.g. accelerated establishment of private retailers; the expansion of self‐service; the forward integration of importers, manufacturers and wholesalers; the hiving off of the small units belonging to large state multiples and cooperatives. In addition, how these governmental market‐oriented policies have affected the marketing strategies of some of the major Hungarian retailers, and the relationships they arc now forging with foreign retailers are also examined. Finally, the various entry methods utilized by foreign retailers are assessed, and the constraints in the retail infrastructure which still remain to be overcome if more foreign retailers than hitherto are to be encouraged to enter this market.     

Retail internationalization and retail failure: issues from the case of Marks and Spencer

Notwithstanding the importance of retailing to urban economies, the role of retailing in the marketing of urban places has been an area neglected by both academics and practitioners alike. It is acknowledged that the principles of marketing can be applied (albeit with modification) to the context of urban places. The theoretical implications of this are considered using Corsico's () metaphors of the city as enterprise, market and commodity. Such issues are considered via a survey of place marketing actors within the specific context of the marketing of towns and cities as shopping destinations in urban places classified as sub-regional and above. Particular attention is paid to responsibility for the marketing of the retail provision, the emphasis given to retail in the marketing/promotional activities of various urban stakeholders, the perceived role of retailing, and the factors influencing the nature of the urban retail provision. Promotion of retailing was found to be important for all urban stakeholders to a greater or lesser degree. However, prime responsibility lay with town centre managers and shopping centre managers. The implications for both theory and practice are discussed.