An exploration of consumers’ experiences in physical stores: comparing consumers’ and retailers’ perspectives in past and present time

Abstract

In this paper, we explore consumers’ in-store experiences and their components, from both a consumer and retailer perspective. This is a replication of a study we performed in 2006 and thus we also examine how the role of the physical store has changed over the last decade. We use the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to improve our understanding of consumers’ in-store experiences. Moreover, we conduct in-depth interviews with Swedish retailers to achieve an understanding of how retailers use aspects of the store environment to enhance the consumer experience. Interestingly, our results suggest that consumers’ in-store experiences to a large extent are created by the same aspects today as ten years ago (e.g. personnel, layout, atmosphere). Furthermore, while retailers today emphasize the importance of fulfilling new and more advanced consumer demands, they often still accentuate the weight and use of traditional values (e.g. personnel and layout) ahead of advanced technology.     

On the Market for Principles of Economics Textbooks: Innovation and Product Differentiation—A Response

E. A. Ross was fired from Stanford University in 1900 because he had angered Jane L. Stanford, the surviving cofounder of the university, for violating her alleged prohibition of faculty participation in partisan political activity. The author argues that this prohibition may never have been written and that the injustice in the firing of Ross may have been compounded by deception.     

Measuring to understand intangible performance drivers

The present qualitative study explores what eleven Swedish organizations have systematically worked at to increase the understanding of the importance of intangibles as performance drivers. The present analysis is accomplished using a combination of evolutionary theory, knowledge-based theory and organizational learning. The results indicate that assets in an accounting sense seem to be of less interest than perceptions of activities that enable future performance. These “enablers” are often customer and employee perceptions of individual, organizational and relational competence. The way for the firms to ascertain a continuous organizational learning process with respect to the value creation chain is to measure intangibles as well as to maintain organizational routines that ensure the transformation of measurement results into action.     

The strategic impact of external networks: subsidiary performance and competence development in the multinational corporation

This paper explores the importance of relational embeddedness in external networks as a strategic resource for performance and competence development in multinational corporations (MNCs). Two different types of relational embeddedness at the subsidiary level—business embeddedness and technical embeddedness—are proposed to have an influence on the subsidiary's market performance as well as its importance for competence development in the MNC. Using data on 97 Swedish MNC subsidiaries, five hypotheses are tested in a LISREL model analysis. The results suggest that technical embeddedness has a positive impact on both the subsidiary expected performance and its role in the development of products and production processes in the MNC. Indirectly, through external technical embeddedness, external business embeddedness also influences the sister units' product and process development and subsidiary market performance. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.