Credit cards in the United Kingdom—where the power lies in the battle between the banks and the retailers

This paper looks at the development of the two types of credit card systems in the UK, the bank credit cards and the retailer credit cards. The article seeks to address the issue of who will hold the balance of power at the introduction of an EFTPOS, or direct‐debit, system into the UK. The situation in 1988 appears to be that retailers are well up the “learning curve” as regards the management and marketing of credit and so are increasingly proving to be a threat to the banks not only in the provision of credit but also in offering a wide range of financial services.     

Retailer credit cards and direct marketing—a question of synergy

In this article the author examines the link between personalised retailer credit cards and the use of direct marketing by retailers to foster the concept of the “privileged customer” with their cardholders, as well as boosting sales. Using the example of Debenhams, the growth of both credit cards and direct marketing is examined and the synergy between the two explored. Detail is given about the credit card data base held by Debenhams and suggestions are made as to how this information could be translated into effective direct marketing communication. The results of Debenhams direct marketing are used to demonstrate the effective use of this particular vehicle and finally consideration is given to the future in the United Kingdom for both retailer credit cards and direct marketing by retailers.     

The provenance of loyalty card data for urban and retail analytics

The deployment of loyalty card and other consumer data in geographic research brings opportunities to explore and understand patterns of purchasing behaviour in unprecedented detail. However, valid generalisation requires thorough evaluation of their potential bias. We argue that, in competitive markets where consumers can choose to shop across competing retailers, loyalty card data from just one of these may not represent a ‘complete’ view of all purchases, and that this ‘completeness’ must be controlled for when assessing bias. To this end, we undertake a UK wide analysis of loyalty card data assembled by a major UK grocery retailer and provide guidelines for their effective deployment in the domains of urban and retail analysis. We assess, for the first time, the ‘completeness’ of circa 500 million customer transactions recorded by a major customer loyalty programme in representing the overall purchasing patterns of circa 16 million consumers across the entire UK, and develop a method by which to do this. Moreover, no operator has complete national store coverage, and so we suggest ways of accommodating this when conducting analysis using loyalty card data. We illustrate the importance of these issues before providing recommendations for the wider use of consumer loyalty card data.     

Smart Card-Based Electronic Card Payment Systems in the Transportation Industry

Many products and services will soon be (or are already being) sold over the Internet or other networks. Paying for these with standard methods of payments, such as cash, checks, credit card, or debit card, may be ineffective or inefficient. For such cases, electronic card payment systems are more appropriate. Several things need to be considered when investigating electronic card payment system options, including: customer needs and benefits, developmental and operational cost, corporate benefits, continually changing technologies, critical mass of customers, security, standards of payment systems, and customer perception and comfort with new technologies. In this article, we analyze how smart card-based systems are used in mass transportation. Managers in mass transportation face the following questions: Do you develop your own electronic card payment system, do you wait for multifunctional cards that will be accepted across many industries to provide the functionality required in your market, or do you do nothing. The discussion here concentrates mainly on the transportation industry, where the transactions and payments are made on local area networks.     

Retailer service acceptance: simply adding a service to the offer portfolio or committing to marketing it

By virtue of their significant influence on customers’ decisions, retailers’ acceptance of a service plays a significant role in the success of that service. Therefore, retailers’ acceptance of the service and commitment to selling the service must be ensured. However, this issue has attracted limited attention in acceptance research, which tends to focus on goods, technologies and consumers. Based on a survey of consumer durables retailers in three countries, this study focuses on retailer acceptance of a complimentary use-guarantee service, which is meant to maintain customer’s ability to use a semi-durable consumer product. The results of this study link retailers’ perceived usefulness, and commitment & effort to their service acceptance. Manufacturer support was found to moderate the relationship between ease of use and acceptance. Further, nationality, retailer’s own use of the service as a consumer and the importance of the manufacturer’s business for retailers were important for retailer acceptance. Thus, manufacturers need to focus as strongly on retailer acceptance as on the end customer acceptance to ensure service success. They also need to ensure the usefulness of the service for retailer, give retailers a reason to commit to the service sales and provide enough support to make retailers comfortable in selling the service.     

Exploring the influence of three types of grocery retailer loyalty programs on customer affective loyalty

Loyalty programs have become a key tool in retailer marketing strategies. In order to manage client heterogeneity adequately, companies have implemented different types of programs: reward programs (RP), loyalty cards (LC) and VIP programs. This paper explores the effects of these three types of programs and provides a comparative analysis of the influence that these three types of programs have on the affective loyalty towards the retailer of customers participating in them. Results show that VIP programs are the most effective in achieving customer affective loyalty, whilst people taking part in reward programs and loyalty card schemes evidence no differences in their affective loyalty towards the store. It can thus be concluded that clients who are loyalty card holders do not value the intangible rewards (preferential treatment) they receive from the store.     

Time to Cut Up Those Debit Cards? Effect of Payment Mode on Willingness to Spend

Financial industry data indicate that consumers increasingly prefer debit cards over credit cards, especially as a means of enforcing financial self-discipline. Given prior research suggesting that credit cards act as spending facilitating stimuli, this move toward reduced credit card use would appear to be in the right direction. Ironically, however, the same logos that were implicated in facilitating spending with credit cards are the logos that appear on debit cards. In what should serve as an eye-opener to consumers, it is found that exposure to debit card logos does result in an increased willingness to spend, similar to credit cards.     

Bonus gift card programs: a methodology to measure the impact on revenue and profit

Many retailers are now offering bonus gift cards to entice customers to buy more regular gift cards. The most common offers are a $5 bonus card with $25 worth of gift card purchases or a $10 bonus card with $50 worth of purchases. Unlike regular gift cards, bonus gift cards are not paid for by other customers. Bonus cards provide $5 or $10 of free credit to a customer at the firm’s expense. Most retailers do not understand the potential for cannibalization of revenue and profit when gift card redeemers use a bonus card for a purchase they would have made without it. Nor do they know what proportion of redeemers represent these cannibalized sales versus the proportion of redeemers that represent incremental purchases. We use an in-market study with a large national restaurant chain to demonstrate a methodology and model to properly evaluate the effect of bonus gift card programs on revenue and profit. We found that although bonus gift cards provide incremental revenue, they can significantly reduce profit particularly in certain retail segments. For those who wish to implement a bonus card program, we provide suggestions to maximize the potential for success.     

零售商品牌资产管理策略体系构建——基于多维理论视角的探讨

零售商品牌资产的管理和创建是零售企业获取持续竞争优势的关键,但关于零售商品牌资产管理策略的理论指导并不系统和丰富。因此,本文从零售商品牌营销管理、顾客情绪管理、顾客体验管理、顾客关系管理、顾客忠诚管理5个多维理论视角,对零售商品牌资产管理的策略体系进行了构建,以期为零售商品牌资产的创建过程和途径提供丰富的管理视野与思路。     

Capturing Retailers’ Brand and Customer Focus

This article uses information from two data sources, Compustat and Nexis Uni, and textual analysis to measure and validate the brand focus and customer focus of 109 U.S. listed retailers. The results from an analysis of their 853 earnings calls in 2010 and 2018 outline that on average, both foci increased over time. Although both foci vary substantially, brand focus varies more widely across retailers than their customer focus. Both foci are independent of each other. Specialty retailers have the highest brand focus, and internet & direct marketing retailers have the highest customer focus. A positive correlation exists between a retailer’s customer focus and its profitability, but not between a retailer’s brand focus and its profitability. The authors use the results to generate a research agenda that can direct future research in further systematically exploring firms’ brand and customer focus.     

Analysis of free gift card program effectiveness

Retailers use various promotions, such as gift cards, to increase profits. When retailers give gift cards “free” to consumers who spend above specified thresholds in a single purchase, some consumers may buy more goods. We develop a model to derive the optimal purchase amount thresholds and gift card values. The model is developed for consumers without and then with a spending constraint. We find that the retailer's profit margin, the degree of forward buying and stockpiling, and use of gift cards in future purchases that would have been made with cash, are the most important factors in determining the profitability of gift cards. Gift cards may be very profitable for high-margin retailers who can limit the degree of forward buying and stockpiling, particularly when consumers use gift cards to buy goods they would not have bought from the retailer without gift cards. If this is how consumers use the gift cards, then consumers spending above the cards’ value at redemption can significantly increase their profitability. Without a consumer spending constraint, it is best for the retailer to offer at most one gift card at a large purchase amount. With a consumer spending constraint, it may be profitable to give gift cards at multiple purchase amount thresholds. We also show that the commonly observed policy of giving gift cards at equally spaced purchase amounts may be profitable when forward buying and stockpiling can be controlled. Moreover, we show that gift cards become more profitable when consumers are inconsistent, that is, they overestimate their probability of redeeming the gift card at purchase time. Finally, gift cards may have only a slight profit advantage over discounts if consumers are consistent. Consumer inconsistency and spending above the cards’ value increase this advantage.     

Competition,agglomeration, and performance of Beijing hotels

Generally the function of marketing in many different types of organisations has been widely recognised in recent years, and accordingly various studies have described the development of the marketing department in both the manufacturing and service industries. However, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to delineating or describing the role of the marketing department in retailing organisations, in spite of evidence of increasing employment of marketing personnel to implement proactive retailer marketing strategies, and correspondingly large increases in marketing expenditures by retailers. This article seeks to redress the balance by reporting the findings of a survey of the operation of marketing departments by 70 of the largest retailing organisations in the UK.     

Electronic Logistics Service Quality (e‐LSQ): Its Impact on the Customer’s Purchase Satisfaction and Retention

The Internet retailing industry continues to grow rapidly. Several Internet retailers are, however, struggling to retain customers due to the high level of competition among incumbents. We propose that customer satisfaction with the order fulfillment process is an important determinant of overall customer satisfaction with the retailer, as well as with the extent of customer retention enjoyed by the retailer. This paper offers a new concept for electronic logistics service quality and investigates the relationship between the quality of online fulfillment and the ensuing retention of customers, using archival data on 260 online retailers. The structural equation model results indicate that satisfaction with the physical distribution quality and cost are positively related with customer’s purchase satisfaction and customer retention. Additionally, the results indicate that while purchase satisfaction is a strong indicator of customer retention, underlying drivers of purchase satisfaction do not have nearly the same impact on customer retention directly as they have on purchase satisfaction.     

What retailers need to understand about website inaccessibility and disabled consumers: Challenges and opportunities

This research uniquely contributes to the marketing policy literature by illuminating the widespread yet seldom studied problem of online inaccessibility of retail websites affecting approximately 30 million disabled Americans. When a website is not designed to be navigated easily or is not compatible with assistive technology such as a screen-reader, these potential customers are not able to independently search for information and conduct transactions. Blind and low vision participants in an empirical study provide their opinions regarding accessibility policy issues and reveal that their frustrations with inaccessible retail websites may result, not only in avoidance of the retailer in its different sales channels but also in antifirm behaviors driven by negative attitudes toward perceived retailer accessibility/disability policy that spur feelings of online marketplace discrimination. Using two different evaluation tools, the top 100 retailers in the United States were evaluated on the accessibility of their websites over the past 4 years (2015–2018). Results show that most websites contain many design errors making navigation very difficult or even impossible for vision impaired consumers. The argument is made that online retailers who proactively address these inaccessibility issues on their websites may significantly increase their customer base and profitability.     

Who Pays for Credit Cards?

The authors model side payments in a competitive credit‐card market. If competitive retailers absorb the cost of accepting credit cards by charging a higher goods price to everyone, then someone must subsidize convenience users of credit cards to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards. The side payment could be financed by card users who roll over balances and pay interest. It is rational for them to do so if their subjective discount rates are high enough. Charging different prices to different customers based on the underlying cost of the payment instrument would be more efficient for retailers. However, banks may offer incentives to attract convenience users because some of them may become interest‐paying users (“revolvers”) in the future.     

具有服务策略的双渠道供应链定价问题研究

本文研究了零售商提供服务的双渠道供应链,分析了零售商在不同的服务成本下提供服务对于供应商和零售商定价策略的影响。研究发现提供服务对于零售商不仅可以扩大利润,还可以把提供服务当作一种有效策略,应对来自电子商务渠道的利润吞噬,通过利润分享从而延缓渠道之间的冲突;只有服务系数小于一个临界值时,提供服务才能使零售商和供应商同时得到帕累托改进。因此,零售商应不断提高服务效率,为消费者提供更高效的服务。     

Relationship marketing in A B2C context: The moderating role of personality traits

More and more, retailers are investing in relationship building as a strategy for enhancing customer retention in the business-to-customer (B2C) context. However, some marketing scholars have expressed concern over the usefulness of relationship marketing under certain conditions. As such, this study investigates the moderating role of personality traits on the relationship between satisfaction-driven relationship quality and behavioral loyalty. Based on a sample of 158 retail shoppers, we find that customers’ overall satisfaction with the retailer leads to quality customer–firm relationships and ultimately, behavioral loyalty to the retailer. We also found that the impact of relationship quality on behavioral loyalty depends on the consumer's personality traits, i.e., consumer innovativeness, variety seeking, and relationship proneness. These findings extend the extant relationship literature by showing that the value of relationship marketing is not universal, thereby refining our understanding of the relationship between customer behavior and relationship marketing. Implications for academics and managers are discussed.     

“Switching is easy”—Service firm communications to encourage customer switching

For several service industries, customer acquisition is challenged because of matured markets. Winning new customers typically means encouraging the competitors׳ customers to switch. This article analyzes “Switching is easy”-messages of retail banks. In their marketing communication, UK banks focus on several aspects to decrease perceived switching costs of their competitor customers. However, many facets stay unmentioned such as stress-related dimensions of switching a relationship. The study therefore contributes to service research by outlining how service firms focus on to decrease perceived switching costs of bank customers to acquire them from competitors.     

Indian Consumers’ Perception for Packaged Food and the Strategies of Food and Grocery Retailers in India—An Analysis

The aim of this article is to study the Indian consumer buying decisions of packaged food and to assess the impact of demographic dynamics on their behavior and their perception about the practicing marketing strategies of different leading food retailers across the National Capital region. We have taken six different retailers—viz. Big Bazaar, Spencer’s Retail, Reliance Fresh, 6Ten retail stores, convenience stores, and kirana (mom-and-pop) shops—in our research in an attempt to examine the consumer’s perception for these retailers’ marketing strategies to sell packaged food. The purpose to choose these retailers is to assess the impact as a whole from organized food retail as well as unorganized food retailing on consumer buying decisions. Respondents were selected by using the stratified random sampling method, and participation was voluntary. 925 respondents from the cities Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, and Faridabad were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. Statistical tools such as chi-square, factor analysis, ANOVA, and the Bonferroni test were used to attain final empirical results and to know the comparison of food retailer strategies with the customer’s choice of retailer.     

大学生信用卡市场现状分析与营销对策

目前,我国大学生信用卡市场普遍存在睡眠卡问题。其原因在于信用卡产品功能单一,附加值开发不够。银行应根据大学生群体特征制定营销策略,从建立关系纽带,培养顾客忠诚度与归属感入手,引导大学生使用信用卡,达到对大学生信用卡的营销目的。