Market and Product Diversification: The Evidence From Retailing

This study explored the number of international regions in which retailers operate, the assortment of product categories they offer their customers, and the effects of these market and product category diversification strategies on retail sales volumes. The analysis used sales data about 246 global large-scale retail stores from diverse industries and countries of origin. We found that both strategies have positive effects on retail sales volumes. The two strategies interact such that the positive effect of market expansion on retail sales volumes is larger for retailers who also follow a strategy of greater product category diversity.     

Relationship Quality—Relationship Value and Power Balance in Business Relationships: Descriptives and Propositions

Purpose: The objective of this study is to develop understanding of the interplay between the perceptions of power balance, relationship value, and relationship quality between retail distributors and their suppliers.

Methodology: The authors applied a phenomenological approach in both qualitative and quantitative data collections and analyses. Key informants in 27 of the dominant retail distributors within 5 Norwegian industries and 50 of their most important suppliers were interviewed.

Findings: The power balance seems to favor the retail distributors. Retail distributors and suppliers tell of somewhat different characteristics pertaining to “best” and “worst” relationships relating to economic-, capability-, and integration-based values as perceived between retail distributors and their suppliers.

Research limitations/implications: The empirical findings indicate the complexity in assessing relationship quality and show a rich basis for further research, thereby contributing to knowledge and insights in characterizing relationship quality when power is asymmetrically distributed between distributors and their suppliers. However, personal interviews may reveal answers at rational, cognitive, and even emotional levels, thus complicating subjective analysis.

Practical implications: The results of the study are important for both researchers and practitioners on both sides of retail distributor–supplier relationships.

Originality/value: This study advances the work on what characterizes relationship quality in asymmetric power business relationships.     

Salesforce Motivation,Compensation and Evaluation by Industrial Distributors

Selling and sales management by industrial distributors is an important area of industrial product and services marketing that has been almost completely ignored by academic researchers. This study attempts to close a few of the gaps. It provides a brief review of the distributor's characeeristics and his hostile marketing environment before a presentation of findings about dktributors' sales force evaluation, compensation and evaluation methods. Conclusions are offered and a plea for further research is made.     

Building Strategic Partnerships in Wine Marketing

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between U.S. wine distributors and wineries. Specifically, it identifies the factors distributors believe contribute to successful winery-distributor relationships. Web-based survey research was conducted with 81 usable responses received. Results indicate that wine quality, dependability of the producer, price, and personal relationship between the winery and distributor are the most important factors in determining whether a distributor will carry a specific wine in their sales portfolio.     

On the measurement of retail marketing mix effects in the presence of different economic regimes

This study deals with the measurement of the effects of retail marketing instruments on annual sales in retail stores. We assume that the sales level in retail stores is determined by an interplay of supply capacity and demand factors. In some stores sales are supply-determined, whereas in other stores sales are demand-determined. If it is not known a priori what economic regime applies, the more traditional approaches lead to biased estimation results. Therefore, a switching regression model is proposed to estimate the marketing mix effects.Our ideas are tested using data from four different types of stores in the Dutch retail trade and a comparison is made with a more traditional approach. The main conclusions are: the traditional approach leads to underestimation of the marketing mix effects. A switching regression model seems to be a promising instrument for analyzing these effects. The method has a wider applicability than the retail trade.     

Organisational capabilities and transaction costs in the analysis of activities and their externalisation: implications for the service industry

Transaction cost theory and the organisational capability view are complementary in the analysis of the firm and in examining the decision to integrate or externalise activities. This article discusses the essential contributions of both theories to understanding the core aspects of the internal organisation of the firm, and goes onto address the key questions of why activities are organised internally or why certain components or services are obtained from suppliers or distributors; and finally looks at the cases in which firms make decisions with regard to supply, distribution or retail sales.     

Open all hours: spatiotemporal fluctuations in U.K. grocery store sales and catchment area demand

Conventional population estimates do not account for spatiotemporal fluctuations in populations over a diurnal timescale at the level of retail store catchments. This presents challenges for the retail location-based decision making process which seeks to predict sales volumes and their temporal characteristics prior to new store construction. We present a novel analysis of the temporal fluctuations of store sales, evidencing links between the spatiotemporal distribution of specific population subgroups and temporal store sales. Previous research linking spatiotemporal populations and store sales is limited owing to the fact that commercial data are not openly available to academic research. However, this research has unprecedented access to store level temporal sales data and an established loyalty card scheme from a major UK grocery retailer making these analyses possible for the first time. Additionally, we demonstrate that current store classifications were inadequate for grouping stores with similar sales profiles and propose four new clusters of stores based on the times of the day that they generate revenues. This development has clear academic and commercial benefits, aiding our understanding of consumer behaviours and a novel solution for improved location modelling. We lay the foundations for further research building spatiotemporal demand fluctuations into retail location models.     

Do Mystery Shoppers Really Predict Customer Satisfaction and Sales Performance?

Mystery shopping (MS) is a widely used tool to monitor the quality of service and personal selling. In consultative retail settings, assessments of mystery shoppers are supposed to capture the most relevant aspects of salespeople’s service and sales behavior. Given the important conclusions drawn by managers from MS results, the standard assumption seems to be that assessments of mystery shoppers are strongly related to customer satisfaction and sales performance. However, surprisingly scant empirical evidence supports this assumption. We test the relationship between MS assessments and customer evaluations and sales performance with large-scale data from three service retail chains. Surprisingly, we do not find a substantial correlation. The results show that mystery shoppers are not good proxies for real customers. While MS assessments are not related to sales, our findings confirm the established correlation between customer satisfaction measurements and sales results.     

A model of retail job characteristics,employee role ambiguity,external customer mind-set,and sales performance

Based upon findings from the sales, retailing, marketing, management, and organizational behavior literatures, the authors develop and test a model of retail employee sales performance that differs from previous efforts by utilizing multi-dimensional conceptualizations of potential antecedents as well as a promising yet previously unexamined employee job attitude–external customer mind-set. The results indicate that the characteristics of the retail employee’s work environment, with one exception, are directly associated with enhanced job attitudes and reduced ambiguity. The exception is that greater amounts of job autonomy are associated with increased levels of ambiguity. Retail employee ambiguity regarding customers and external customer mind-set are both associated with sales performance.     

城市空间结构与零售业销售额之间的关系——基于新经济地理学潜力模型的分析

城市空间结构与城市内各区域商业活动特别是零售业的关系十分密切。文章运用新经济地理学潜力模型构建了一个同时考虑影响零售额的需求因素和供给因素的模型,以零售额作为被解释变量,利用各区域人口、零售店从业人数、零售店卖场面积等相关数据,计算模型中各解释变量的系数,并利用推导出来的模型,通过改变模型中空间结构的系数,对各区域零售额的变化进行模拟分析,有助于弄清城市空间结构变化与城市各区域零售业零售额变化之间的关系,得出城市空间结构变化对各区域零售额变化所产生的影响,为城市空间规划提供参考。     

Growth-cycle decomposition diffusion model

The diffusion model has been widely used to explain the S-shaped cumulative growth of markets for retail service and consumer durable goods. In many situations, sales fluctuate because of both growth of innovation diffusion and transitory changes in an external factor, called cycle. The traditional diffusion model, however, cannot distinguish between the two. We develop the growth-cycle decomposition diffusion model to distinguish the growth from the cycle, where the cycle incorporates a few external variables determining the transitory sales environment. The proposed model is applied to estimating the diffusion process for the annual sales of room air conditioners in Korea.     

Redirecting direct selling: High-touch embraces high-tech

Direct selling, defined as a sales channel without a fixed retail location, was built on the premise of leveraging an individual's social networks. This industry is being redirected by embracing social media; here, the challenge lies in providing the benefits of face-to-face selling, augmented by social media. An examination of the Direct Selling News ‘Global 100 Top Direct Sellers’ found that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter represent the most widely employed social networks in the industry. While 76% of direct sellers utilize social media for promotional purposes, 55% use it for recruiting new distributors and 42% use it for reactive purposes. Consumers are the most popular target for social media, followed by distributors and communities. Social media has evolved as a driver of strategy, and will become even more important in the future. Improved customer relationships are developing by listening and reacting to concerns. The transparency created by social media is enhancing trust and ethical organizational cultures. Finally, consumer brand communities are emerging that increase brand value.     

网络零售的商品特性适合度浅析

电子商务和传统商务在本质属性上并没有什么不同,但加入了网络这种新型的生产工具后,电子商务与传统商务又在某些方面产生了差异。对在传统商务条件下盈利的产品,如果是简单的、不加选择的移植到网络中进行销售,是有一定风险的,所以,对什么商品可以在网上成功销售,选择出适合于网络零售的产品,就很有必要。本文将从网络零售的商品特性进行分析。     

Sales expectations and inventory changes in retail trade

In this paper a single equation inventory investment model is estimated for the United States retail sector. Monthly data for the 1970s are utilized. In estimating the model it is alternatively assumed that expectations were formed according to a seasonal model, to perfect foresight, and to a narrowly rational expectations model. We find that a model in which expected sales and the expected rate of inflation are narrowly rational can explain most of the variation in retail inventory investment during the time period studied. The results of the estimation imply that retailers have a relatively short forecast horizon, that they can react quickly to either unexpected sales or to a deviation of actual from desired inventory stocks, and that an increase in the real of interest has a statistically negative impact on retail inventory investment.     

区域商贸流通发展与公路交通水平计量分析

基于灰色关联模型的计量分析,发现地区商贸流通业发展与公路交通基础设施水平具有较强的关联性:在公路里程、公路客运量、公路货运量和民用汽车拥有量中,民用汽车拥有量是最重要的影响因素,公路货运量次之;在社会消费品零售总额、市的零售额、县的零售额、县以下的零售额、批发和零售业零售额、住宿和餐饮业零售额中,公路交通基础设施对县以下的零售额的影响程度最大,对批发和零售业零售额的影响程度次之。     

Storytelling during retail sales encounters

Many researchers have emphasized the importance of communication in personal selling. Psychologists and researchers in management and advertising have recognized the importance of communication via stories, but this has not extended to research in sales. This paper uses a framework developed from exploratory field work and the literature on stories to investigate storytelling by retail salespeople in three similar experimental studies. The experiments manipulate personal versus business stories across three different topic areas: entity, product, and digression. The results suggest that product stories told from a business point of view may be most effective in enhancing consumers’ purchase intentions in onetime sales encounters.     

Modifying Conjoint Methods to Model Managers' Reactions to Business Environmental Trends: An Application to Modeling Retailer Reactions to Sales Trends

This article proposes and demonstrates how conjoint methods can be adapted to allow the modeling of managerial reactions to various changes in economic and competitive environments and their effects on observed sales levels. Because in general micro-level data on strategic decision making over time are difficult and expensive to obtain, this approach can be of much value to the further study of managerial strategic behavior and market dynamics. In our application we model retailer reactions to changes in their sales, focusing in particular on the actions that affect the demand for retail space and possibilities to improve retail sites. Choice responses to hypothetical sales and environmental trend scenarios are collected from 183 retailers and used to estimate to logit regression model that predicts retailers' probabilities of choosing actions. The model results confirm that retailers are more likely to take action when sales go down than when they go up, and also that they react more quickly if sales go down. It is also found that retailers are more reluctant to change the positioning of their store when confronted with a sales increase than when confronted with a sales decrease. The model is compared with a non-experimental model that is based on retailers' reactions to the trends they report to have observed for their own stores. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for the further development of conjoint-like approaches to studying entrepreneurial behavior.     

Cross-category sales promotion effects

We introduce a multivariate binomial logit model measuring cross-category dependence and sales promotion effects of a retail assortment. This model requires as data both the market baskets of individual shoppers and the categories currently promoted in a retail outlet. A special section describes the stepwise procedure used to estimate parameters of this model. Its application is demonstrated analyzing 6147 purchases that were acquired in a medium-sized supermarket. We finally discuss the managerial relevance of this model for sales promotion decisions of retail firms.