shopper taxonomy for retail strategy development

Segmentation of shoppers has been explored by many academic researchers and business practitioners seeking to understand shopping behaviour or to develop marketing strategies for particular customer groups. Market segmentation holds the key to successful marketing strategy as it encourages understanding of the key variables that differentiate specific segments.

The shopper taxonomy determined through this study is based on a set of variables that is relevant and appropriate for shopper segmentation and reflects the key aspects important to shoppers in motivating shopping behaviour towards a specific retail location. This taxonomy extends the proposed motivational taxonomy of Westbrook and Black (1985), derived from Tauber's (1972) earlier research. Westbrook and Black defined this taxonomy through shopping motives, and identified categories of product-oriented, experiential and a combination of product and experiential shoppers. Their research findings, however, pointed to a six-cluster typology, defining department stone shopping around seven motivations aligned with evaluating options and acquiring the products, engaging in the sales process and gaining stimulation and affiliation through the retail environment.

The “apathetic”, “shopping-processed involved” and “choice optimisation” shopper segments described by Westbrook and Black align with the “have to” “experiential” and “practical” “segments found in this study in terms of their focus on the shopping activity itself and the affiliation and stimulation motives associated with the shopping activity. Other associations between shopper segments across the two studies are less clear, and may be explained through the differing purposes for which the studies were undertaken and resulting variation in the measures used to define the motivational constructs.     

The covariates of regularity in purchase timing

An examination of the timing of consumers' purchases for coffee reveals that consumers vary a great deal in terms of the regularity of their purchasing behavior. Some consumers make purchases at seemingly random time intervals, while others purchase at highly regular intervals. The measurement of regularity in purchase timing, as well as the identification of its covariates, is important in many contexts such as modeling purchase incidence and sales forecasting. We measure the degree of regularity among a sample of coffee purchasers and identify several consumer characteristics that vary with the degree of regularity in purchase timing. Results show that regularity in purchase timing is related to brand loyalty, store loyalty and deal proneness, as well as to certain pattern of routinization by the households, and that regularity may be used, along with other aspects of purchase behavior, to provide a basis for market segmentation.The authors wish to acknowledge the support of Information Resources Inc. for providing the data, and are grateful to Professor Jane T. Landwehr, University of Delaware, for her help.     

中国粮食财政干预政策产出效应分析

本文首先从理论上构建了限量收购和无限量收购条件下各种粮食干预政策的产出效应模型。分析表明:在两种收购条件下补贴政策及相应的粮食价格对剩余产量是否有拉动作用取决于农户的生产行为是否受到收入约束,而在限量收购下的收购量对剩余产量存在正反双重效应。其次,本文以我国改革开放以来的粮食数据为基础对该结论进行验证,结果表明就全国平均意义上而言,补贴政策对剩余粮食产量拉动作用有限,而粮食价格的拉动作用则相对较大,说明农户生产行为并未受到收入约束,而限量收购下的收购量对剩余产量的双重效应几乎完全抵消,从而只影响总产量而不会引致扩散效应。     

The relationship between purchase regularity and propensity to accelerate

Identifying random and regular-buying household segments and relating them to demographic and shopping characteristics has been the focus of many marketing studies. Missing from the marketing literature, however, is a study that relates purchase regularity to marketing mix sensitivities. Such study could provide substantive implications since it would explore a practical dimension of a segmentation scheme based on purchase regularity. In this article, we investigate the relationship between purchase regularity and propensity to accelerate through the use of a mixture Weibull model of purchase timing. Applying this perspective to purchase timing data on four product categories (ketchup, sugar, bathroom tissue, margarine), we show that in the frequently purchased categories of bathroom tissue and margarine, random buyers do not exhibit any propensity to accelerate while regular buyers do. In the occasionally purchased categories of ketchup and sugar on the other hand, random buyers exhibit at least as much propensity to accelerate their purchases as regular buyers do. Our rationale for these results is based on information-theoretic arguments suggesting that propensity to accelerate depends on the frequency at which a product category is purchased.     

What is the Right Supply Chain for Your Shopper? Exploring the Shopper Service Ecosystem

The emergence of shopper marketing represents a major strategic force in consumer goods branding and retailing, and poses significant challenges to pre existing supply chain thought that most scholars have yet to address. In order to address the marketing and supply chain challenges presented by shopper marketing initiatives, scholars from both disciplines can find common ground by focusing on the shopper instead of consumers or products. The issue is no longer one of matching a supply chain to a product. Instead, marketers and supply chain managers need to ask, “What's the right supply chain for our shopper?” The shopper service ecosystem framework developed in this paper brings together the service dominant logic of marketing with the service ecosystem perspective in supply chain management. Future research frontiers suggest research directions that bridge the marketing and supply chain disciplines to create a multidisciplinary foundation for future research in the shopper marketing realm.     

Purchase frequency,sample selection,and price sensitivity: The heavy-user bias

We study the relationship between purchase frequency and volume and choice behavior as summarized by brand preferences and price sensitivity. Our most striking finding is that consumers with high purchase frequency or high purchase volume are much more price sensitive and have more sharply defined preferences for national brands than consumers with low frequency or low volume of purchase. In much of the choice literature, analysis is confined to households that have on average a larger number of purchases than is representative of the ERIM panel. Our findings suggest that some caution should be exercised in interpreting studies that employ purchase-frequency or purchase-number sample inclusion rules. Our findings also support an information theoretic point of view in which households become more price sensitive via costly acquisition of information about the distribution of prices.We acknowledge helpful comments from Greg Allenby and Bob Blattberg. Support from the Micro-Marketing Project at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago is gratefully acknowledged. Byung-Do Kim is the corresponding author.     

《良友》画报的品牌化经营策略探析

《良友》画报是近代上海一份完全按照商业化模式经营的中产阶级的市民时尚杂志。在其创始人伍联德的全力打造下,《良友》在观念经营、内容经营、发行经营及广告经营等方面都有突出表现,并创造了二十世纪上半叶期刊杂志商业化经营模式的范例。     

How does shopping duration evolve and influence buying behavior? The role of marketing and shopping environment

This study investigates how promotional activities, mall size, and past shopping experiences affect customer shopping duration, and elucidates how shopping duration induces immediate, transient, and long-term effects on customer decisions of whether and how much to buy in the offline shopping mall format. We simultaneously model purchase incidence, purchase amount, and shopping duration to examine empirically the constructs’ dynamic impacts. The proposed model is calibrated using six-year-long transaction data of 43,326 customers that patronize malls operated by a large retail firm. The results reveal that shopping duration leads to an immediate increase in the amount spent by customers in a given period. The transient effects of shopping duration on purchase incidence and amount are significantly positive. However, in the long term, while purchase frequency appears to increase with cumulative shopping duration, purchase amount is negatively affected. Further, shopping duration increases with the size of the mall visited and the level of promotion but tends to converge to a lower level in the long term. Managerial implications for effectively managing customer experience are discussed.     

Would you bring home ugly produce? Motivators and demotivators for ugly food consumption

It is important to reduce food waste by successfully promoting ugly food consumption. Thus, this study uses the food quality attribute model to investigate certain key factors - motivators and demotivators that can influence consumers’ attitudes toward and subsequent purchases of ugly produce. This study further examines differences in these key factors between ugly food buyers and non-buyers. The results indicate that price consciousness and environmental self-identity stimulate ugly food consumption, but physical appearance discourages its purchase. The influences of the motivators are more salient for buyers, while the influences of the demotivators are more salient for non-buyers.     

Why shopping pals make malls different?

The present study examines the effects of the specific type of ompanion a shopper shops with (i.e., friend versus family member) on the emotional attachment to malls. The study aims to explain this influence through two potential mediators, that is, shopping arousal, and shopping apprehension, the relevance of which has been shown in the extant reviewed psychosocial literature. The emotional attachment of shoppers to their mall depends on whom they are shopping with: shopping with friends affects both shoppers' arousal and apprehension. Only arousal mediates the relationship between shopping pal and mall attachment. Our findings provide new insight on the psychological processes explaining the relation shoppers develop with their shopping environment and give retail managers guidelines for increasing shoppers' attachment to their malls.     

公共服务采购:政府与民间互动的桥梁

对于公共服务,政府同样面临自身生产抑或市场采购的选择.随着公共财政改革的推进,公共服务采购的份额将不断提升.当前我国公共服务的采购份额过低,覆盖范围狭窄,种类单一,相关研究滞后.通过鼓励民间组织参与服务采购和\"跨部门\"服务采购预算体系的构建,将会改变公共服务的垄断供给结构,实现民间组织发展与预算效率提升的\"双赢\"目标.