Price image and the sugrophobia effect on luxury retail purchase intention

Consumer shopping behavior in luxury retail stores continues to be a subject of interest among marketing researchers. Such a phenomenon has led us to explore how price image and sugrophobia, a psychological feeling of being taken advantage of, would influence consumers' future behavioural intention in the context of luxury retail store. Informed by a survey of 400 consumers, this study adopts the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S–O-R) model to examine how price image triggers consumer perceptions (i.e., perceived value, trust and attitude) and results in behavioral intention. Sugrophobia is included in the S–O-R model to assess its moderating effect. Data analysis using SEM-PLS demonstrates that a retailer's price image has a positive effect on consumers' perceived value, trust, attitude, and future behavioral intention. Sugrophobia, in turn, is found to weaken the relationship between price image and consumer perceptions. The study thus highlights the relevance of sugrophobia among risk-averse consumers and the necessity to manage sugrophobic consumers effectively in the context of a luxury retail store. Implications of the study are discussed.     

Exploring retail orientated rotating savings and credit associations: festive season ‘stokvels’ in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Festive season rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) or ‘stokvels’ form a large segment of the market in the lower-income bracket and informal market sector in South Africa and have a high collective purchasing power. This study explores the multi-month, multi-phase process through which these stokvels’ evaluate and purchase bulk groceries from retailers at a substantial discount during the festive season. The study followed an exploratory research design through fifteen in-depth interviews of retailers, interviews that were thematically analysed. The findings revealed four phases in festive season stokvel’s buying process, namely: Need Development, Double-Evaluation Loop, List Consolidation, and Post-purchase Behavior. Each phase encapsulated a number of salient interdependent relationships and prominent time periods in which activities occurred over a year through the lens of the participating retailers. While the actual transaction happens in December, the process usually starts before April of that year. The process is modeled to show when certain phases of the process are completed as well as the actors involved (stokvel, retailer, manufacturer/supplier). To date, there has been no research that has examined the buying process of festive season stokvels through the perspective of the retailer. By creating the first map of this commercial and social process, this exploratory research paves the way for further research into the selling and buying processes in these widely used systems of group purchase.     

Development pressure and retail planning: a study of 20-year change in Cardiff,UK

This article describes and explains changes in the retail landscape of a major British city over the last 20 years. It thus serves to continue the survey of change initiated in 1989 with a comparative analysis of the retail structures of Cardiff (UK) and Charlotte (USA). The changes reviewed in the present study are shown to exemplify broad trends in UK retailing, as well as the growing influences of town planning and urban regeneration policies.     

Town centre management in the UK: A review,synthesis and research agenda

Despite rapid growth in the number of town centre management schemes in the UK there have been few attempts to consider this topic from an academic perspective. This article develops a typology of town centre management schemes, based upon a comprehensive review of existing literature. The criteria of organizational structure and resource origin are identified as primary influences in the initiation and development of such schemes. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda which considers both local governance and spatial and temporal themes in the initiation and development of town centre management. The analysis of such factors is vital to a fuller understanding of this area.     

Blockchain application in consumer services: A review and future research agenda

The potential of blockchain technology (BCT) to modify and innovates established business structures and frameworks has received widespread attention. Academia and businesses are becoming increasingly curious about how this technology could be used to improve and refine consumer services and operations. Despite the growing popularity of blockchain research in consumer services, there remains a dearth of detailed summaries in the literature. Hence, this bibliometric analysis, combined with a systematic literature review (SLR) using SPAR-4-SLR protocol with the theories, characteristics, contexts, and methods framework (A hybrid review), aims to convey qualitative and quantitative knowledge on the ever-evolving subject of blockchain application in consumer services in an organized manner. Specifically, this article analyses: (1) the current publication trends in studies devoted to blockchain-based applications for consumers, (2) the most important publications and themes of research in this field, (3) the evolution of blockchain in consumer service over the years, and the most current trends in this field, (4) the advantages and challenges of incorporating BCT into consumer services, (5) gaps in the existing literature that future researchers should investigate. In addition, this review also describes the widely used theories, characteristics, and methods in the application of blockchain in consumer service research by examining the most applied theories, methods, constructs, and study contexts and paving the way for new research directions. The review includes 417 documents after searching for scholarly publications in two databases (Web of Science and Scopus) and choosing documents based on their relevance to the stated goals.     

How to maintain sustainable consumer behaviours: A systematic review and future research agenda

Maintaining sustainable consumer behaviours is necessary for both mitigating environmental problems and the success of sustainable businesses. However, to date, the focus is mainly on the motivation-adoption link (i.e., how to motivate sustainable consumer behaviours) rather than the adoption-continuance link (i.e., how to maintain those behaviours). This study addresses the link between sustainability adoption and continuance, through a structured literature review. Specifically, this study synthesizes what is (and is not) known about the post-adoption (continuance) stage of the sustainable consumer journey, by reviewing and integrating the results of 87 articles. This review has three key outcomes. First, it elaborates on the importance and distinction of the continuance stage, which is predicted by a set of different and ‘evolving’ factors, compared with motivation and initial adoption. Second, the key components of the continuance stage are identified and grouped under (I) post-adoption cognitive perceptions, (II) emotional outcomes, and (III) subsequent behavioural patterns of (dis)continuance, spillover, advocacy, loyalty and habit formation. Third, this study introduces the concept of sustainable consumer behaviour continuity and discusses theoretical relationships in a conceptual framework. Finally, this review identifies knowledge gaps and provides research directions as well as implications for theory and practice.     

Marketing education to international students: A systematic literature review and future research agenda

Even though numerous studies provide information on marketing education to international students, research that reviews the accrued knowledge holistically remains elusive. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is to (1) systematically synthesize, compile and understand the existing line of empirical research on the topic of marketing education to international students and (2) outline a comprehensive future research agenda to help further advance this field. This study adopts the theory-context-characteristics-methodology (TCCM) framework proposed by Paul and Rosado-Serrano to systematically review 52 articles published in A*, A and B category journals from the ABDC Journal Quality List. This systematic review reveals that the existing studies mostly focus on consumer-specific theories and detects a need for more macro-market, and industry-related theoretical perspectives (theory); it also identifies research gaps related to international student host and home country settings (context), and the application of competition-related variables for the main relationships in this field (characteristics). Finally, the author proposes several methodological best practices (methodology) to advance findings in this field.     

The merchants of meta: A research agenda to understand the future of retailing in the metaverse

Due to rapid technological developments, the metaverse is quickly garnering attention from all areas of retailing. With a projected market of $800 billion by 2024, the metaverse is expected to radically reshape retailing in the digital world. However, very little is known about the metaverse from a customer, retailer, or brand perspective.This article summarizes how the metaverse has been conceptualized thus far in the literature and the popular press. The authors offer a new conceptualization of the metaverse that contains four distinct dimensions: online collaboration, high consumer immersion, unique digital assets, and digital personas.Considering that the technologies currently used to provide high consumer immersion (e.g., augmented reality, virtual reality) and unique digital assets (e.g., blockchain technology) are not fully developed or commercialized, the authors also propose the concept of a transitory metaverse to understand the current stage of metaverse development better.The authors conclude by providing 27 directions for future research based on a full factorial of how the metaverse dimensions amplify three customer touchpoints in the digital experience (digital economic exchange, complex social relationships, direct environment interaction) for the three main stakeholders of any retailing exchange (consumers, retailers, brands) along the entire customer journey (pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase).     

Consumer behaviour in cross-border e-commerce: Systematic literature review and future research agenda

Cross-border electronic commerce (CBEC) was developed from traditional e-commerce to cater to the growing demand for online transactions among global traders. Consumer behaviour is one of the most important topics that multistakeholders (e.g., e-commerce platforms, entrepreneurs, governments and third-party service providers) need to understand to develop CBEC. Although for over a decade studies across disciplines and regions have explored various consumer behaviours and their factors in CBEC through diverse research methods and theoretical lenses, the current literature is still fragmented and lacks consolidation of past contributions. In the present study, we conduct a systematic literature review based on 40 CBEC studies to present an overview of the current research status of the field. This study analyzes research contexts, theoretical applications and methods, and unifies a CBEC definition as a benchmark for future research. More importantly, we employ the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) framework to categorize factors into the inner and outer CBEC ecosystem stimuli, cognitive and affective states, and approach and avoidance behaviours, and to generalize two consumer behavioural patterns to provide a comprehensive understanding of consumer behaviours in CBEC. With the proposed future research directions, we believe that this review can serve as a fundamental and informative guideline for researchers to continue advancing knowledge of the field.     

Barriers to the advancement of modern food retail formats: theory and measurement

The recent expansion of global food retailers into emerging economies has made the study of food retail modernization especially relevant at this time. We present a framework to analyze limitations to market share growth of retail formats based on diffusion across consumer segments and by product category. We then propose a measurement approach, based on consumer surveys, that quantifies the impact of these processes on supermarket market share. Food retail modernization is then examined in Hong Kong by this approach for two points in time. In a 1995 diagnostic study, we find that geographic and economic segment diffusion of supermarkets is complete, but that product category-dependent diffusion (specifically perishables) is not. The latter, thereby, becomes the major restriction on supermarket share gain. In 1999, a second study measures the impact of the introduction of superstores, a large modern format, on the perishable restriction to modern format share growth. Consumers perceived superstore perishables to be superior to supermarkets’, but these views had little impact on the ability of modern format to wrest additional share from traditional markets. We discuss diagnostic and monitoring applications, and extensions of the approach to other retail contexts.     

靠规模和价格赢得顾客欧洲零售业认为:将来成功与否在于市场规模

前欧盟反垄断委员会委员Karel van Miert提及欧洲零售业意义深远的结构改革时,喜欢回想起上世纪五、六十年代该行业的状况.在那个年代,零售业由许多小型零售商组成,其中有许多是由家庭经营的,他们的主要任务是向消费者出售实力雄厚的生产商的产品.现在,这样的年代已经一去不复返了--势均力敌的状态已经被打破.中小型商店已被销售额达到百万欧元以上大型跨国零售集团所替代.     

Asymmetric Price Adjustment in the US Gasoline Industry: Evidence from Bayesian Threshold Dynamic Panel Data Models

This paper investigates the gasoline price adjustment to changes in the input cost price for a panel of 48 US states using a monthly data set covering the period 1994–2011. We build, for the first time, a non-linear threshold panel vector-error-correction model (PVECM) and propose efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Bayesian techniques. Our findings indicate that states with high margin experience a slower adjustment and a more asymmetric response to input price cost shocks. Our results are robust to potential structural breaks in the threshold parameter, which is important as market conditions change over time and are very sensitive to production/consumption constraints. Lastly, we attribute fluctuations in the gasoline prices to input cost shocks, arguing that the peak responses occurring one month after the shock are short-lived.     

Brand management in small and medium-sized (SME) retailers: A future research agenda

Abstract

Recently, an emerging body of literature has advocated the importance of branding to small and medium-sized (SME) retailers. Nonetheless, this discourse has ignored the complexities and idiosyncrasies of retail branding. The aim of this paper is to provide a new theoretical understanding of brand management by SME retailers. In order to achieve this aim, the paper integrates the brand management, SME branding, and retail branding literature, and offers a conceptual framework for SME retail branding. A number of propositions are included that aid understanding of brand management in SME retail organisations. It is anticipated that these propositions will help shape future empirical research in this area. Further in-depth research into the application of branding within the SME retail context would address a significant gap in academic knowledge. In doing so, it would also provide important insights for management practice.     

Changing the game to compete: Innovations in the fashion retail industry from the disruptive business model

Unprecedented competition and emergent technologies have posed a challenge to many traditional retailers in recent years. Yet within this competitive environment, emerging innovative business models have thrived and successfully disrupted the industry. We analyze the nature of disruptive business-model innovations and the ways they disrupt the fashion retail industry. To that end, we examine three disruptors in the industry: born-digital brands, AI-enabled demand forecasting and product design, and collaborative consumption. After introducing the concept of disruptive business-model innovation, we discuss the three disruptors’ effects on the fashion industry. We find that all of these models keenly answer fundamental needs unmet by current business models, such as offering quality products at a competitive price, curated services, and sustainable consumption. At the same time, all three disruptors suggest effective operation models for handling demand uncertainty, inventory management, and timely responses to the market, all of which are inherent issues for current push supply chains and forecast-based, inventory-driven systems. Based on this analysis, we discuss important implications for both academics and industry practitioners.     

“The World's Local Bank”: HSBC's Expansion in the US,Canada and Mexico

ABSTRACT

HSBC has built up a major retail banking presence in Canada, the US, and Mexico. This strategy is unusual both in its conception and execution. HSBC has pursued its strategy through an aggressive series of acquisitions, and its strategy in North America may prefigure its strategy for Europe and South America. The evidence suggests that HSBC first aimed to diversify out of Hong Kong and then to overcome limits on domestic growth. HSBC's continuing success will depend on its ability to acquire and integrate its acquisitions, and to be better than its local competitors at managing a multi-unit organization.

RESUMEN. El HSBC se ha ido expandiendo, hasta convertirse en el banco comercial con mayor presencia en Canadá, los Estados Unidos y México. Esta estrategia es poco común, tanto en su concepción como en su ejecución. El HSBC ha implementado esta estrategia a través de una serie de adquisiciones agresivas, y a través de su estrategia en los Estados Unidos se puede pronosticar la que utilizará en Europa y América del Sur. Todo indica que el primer objetivo del HSBC consistió en diversificarse fuera de Hong Kong y, a continuación. superar su crecimiento doméstico. El continuado éxito del HSBC dependerá de su habilidad en comprar e integrar sus adquisiciones. y de ser mejor que su competencia local en la administración de una organización multi-unidades.

RESUMO. O HSBC consolidou a sua presença como um grande banco de varejo no Canadá, nos Estados Unidos e no México. Esta estratégia é incomum tanto pela sua concepção quanto pela sua execução. O HSBC perseguiu esta estratégia através de uma seqüência agressiva de aquisições, e a sua estratégia na América do Norte parece ser a mesma para a Europa e para a América do Sul. A evidência sugere que o HSBC pretendia, em princípio. diversificar a sua atuação fora de Hong-Kong e, então. superar os limites do crescimento doméstico. O seu sucesso contínuo dependerá da sua habilidade em adquirir e integrar as suas aquisições. tornando-se melhor do que os seus competidores locais na administração de uma organização com múltiplas unidades.     

Too close to be similar: Product and price competition in retail gasoline markets

We examine how product and pricing decisions of retail gasoline stations depend on local market demographics and the degree of competitive intensity in the market. We are able to shed light on the observed empirical phenomenon that proximate gasoline stations price very similarly in some markets, but very differently in other markets. Our analysis of product design and price competition between firms integrates two critical dimensions of heterogeneity across consumers: Consumers differ in their locations and in their travel costs, as in models of horizontal differentiation. They also differ in their relative preference or valuations for product quality dimensions, in terms of the offered station services (such as pay-at-pump, number of service bays or other added services), as in models of vertical differentiation. We find that the degree of local competitive intensity and the dispersion in consumer incomes are sufficient to explain variations in the product and pricing choices of competing firms. Closely located retailers who face sufficient income dispersion across consumers in a local market may differentiate on product design and pricing strategies. In contrast, retailers that are farther apart from each other may adopt similar product design and pricing strategies if the market is relatively homogeneous on income. Using empirical survey data on prices and station characteristics gathered across 724 gasoline stations in the St. Louis metropolitan area, and employing a multivariate logit model that predicts the joint probability of stations within a local market differentiating on product design and pricing strategies as a function of market demographics and local competitive intensity, we find strong support for the central implications of the theory.

Defining the gap between research and practice in public relations programme evaluation – towards a new research agenda

The current situation in public relations programme evaluation is neatly summarized by McCoy who commented that ‘probably the most common buzzwords in public relations in the last ten years have been evaluation and accountability’ (McCoy 2005, 3). This paper examines the academic and practitioner‐based literature and research on programme evaluation and it detects different priorities and approaches that may partly explain why the debate on acceptable and agreed evaluation methods continues. It analyses those differences and proposes a research agenda to bridge the gap and move the debate forward.     

Don't ignore the floor: Exploring multisensory atmospheric congruence between music and flooring in a retail environment

In retail environments, consumers commonly evaluate products while standing on some type of flooring and concurrently being exposed to music; however, no study has examined the interaction of these two atmospheric cues. To bridge this gap, this research examines whether retailers can benefit from creating multisensory atmospheric congruent rather than incongruent retail environments of flooring and music. The results of an experiment in a real retail store reveal positive effects of multisensory congruent retail environments (e.g., soft music combined with soft flooring) on product evaluations. This study provides a new process explanation with consumers’ purchase‐related self‐confidence mediating these effects. Specifically, consumers in congruent rather than incongruent retail environments experience more purchase‐related self‐confidence, which in turn leads to more favorable product evaluations. Furthermore, this study shows that consumers with a low rather than a high preference for haptic information are influenced more by multisensory atmospheric congruence when evaluating a product haptically.     

Tourism coopetition: An introduction to the subject and a research agenda

This paper aims to verify the current status of the research on coopetition applied to Tourism. In order to overcome the lack of tools for analyzing competitive advantage generated by relational components, this paper suggests the use of the coopetition construct as a methodological tool for analyzing the cooperation in networks for the management of tourism destinations. To that end, we performed a bibliometric analysis on ‘tourism coopetition' in scientific research papers published from 1995 to 2015 and indexed in the Web of Science and SciVerse Scopus databases. This helped us to conclude that coopetition is a behavior representing the key organizational methods of tourism destinations, especially when considering the interdependence and complementarity of this sector; thus, it should be a fundamental topic of tourism research. In this sense, the paper presents a research agenda in order to establish coopetition as key to understanding the behavior of all those involved in tourism at a particular destination.     

Doors and boundaries: A recent history of the relationship between research and practice in UK organizational and management research

This article looks at a selection of significant episodes in the history of organizational and management research, and the policies in this field of the UK Social Science Research Council. The episodes begin in the Council's early days in the mid-1960s, and run through its high-profile efforts to improve management research at the end of the 1980s to the start of a new initiative sanctioned by the Council in 2001. They have been chosen because they are important milestones in the development of the field. They also illustrate a central issue which has been evident throughout the period: whether management research should be framed as essentially different or merely seen as carrying some sort of deficit or remedial gap with respect to the other ‘founding disciplines’. They also illustrate an important dilemma facing the funding agency in its longstanding if erratic attempts to engage with the processes through which social science research is used – namely the tension between the goals and rhetoric of excellence and relevance. One episode which illustrates these issues particularly well is that of the Open Door Scheme, a radical SSRC innovation in the 1970s which encouraged non-academic participation in the selection of management research topics. Changes within the funding agency over the same period are crucial for this story. We reflect on their relevance for the episodic developments within management research. From these points of enquiry, we derive a historical, institutional analysis of the interactions between public research funding and management research, of the interplay between the worlds of practice and research, and the ways in which a dialectic has been constructed between concepts of use and relevance, on the one hand, and excellence and rigour on the other.