Motives behind retailers’ post-entry expansion - Evidence from the Chinese luxury fashion market

This study aims to examine the motives behind retailers’ post-entry expansion in foreign markets. Through case studies of eleven participating luxury fashion retailers in China, qualitative data was collected from twenty-two executive interviews. Although their initial market entry was driven by both reactive (push) and proactive (pull) factors, the motives behind their post-entry expansion have become predominantly proactive, especially long-term growth strategies, the ambition to extend their brands and retail formats to more cities, and the experiences gained in entry markets. The desire to optimize the retail store portfolio through multiple channel strategies have slowed down the expansions of physical stores.     

Proactive versus reactive apparel brands in sustainability: Influences on brand loyalty

Building on the literature in brand loyalty and sustainable consumption of apparel, this study compares the loyalty formation mechanism between sustainable fashion and fast fashion brands. A series of hypotheses proposing the difference in the loyalty formation between the two types of apparel brands were developed. A structural equation modeling tested the research model with a sample of 556 U.S. respondents. Although somewhat inconsistent, the results suggest that consumers form brand loyalty toward sustainable versus fast fashion in a different manner. Implications for marketers as well as directions for future research are discussed.     

Dreaming of the West: The power of the brand in Soviet Lithuania, 1960s–1980s

Abstract

The article reveals the interest in foreign trademarks observed in Lithuanian society from the 1960s through the 1980s, when the demand for brand names spread after Western culture reached the Soviet Union. The consumption of Western cultural products, or imitations thereof, became one of the key symbolic expressions of freedom in Soviet society. In Lithuania, the most popular clothes were those bearing fake trademarks, even though Soviet authorities attempted to prevent the desire for and the wearing of these garments through the use of ideological tools.     

基于球谐变换的无人机蜂群RCS快速分析算法

为了获取目标的雷达截面积(Radar Cross Section,RCS),传统的方法是采用矩量法（Method of Moment,MOM）或多层快速多极子方法(Multi-level Fast Multipole Algorithm,MLFMA),尽管对目标的RCS计算精确,但其要求计算机的存储量大且计算耗时。而对于由上百成千个小型无人机组成的无人机蜂群而言,若采用上述方法来计算其RCS,计算量巨大,甚至无法计算。针对上述问题,提出了采用球面波展开技术与球谐变换相结合的方法来提升对无人机蜂群RCS的仿真效率,其关键技术是通过改变球谐函数中的求和次序,利用快速傅里叶变换来计算偏心球面上离散点的电场分布。数值实例表明,相比于高精度的MLFMA,所提方法获取蜂群无人机RCS的结果与其吻合良好,但对计算机内存的需求远远小于MLFMA,且随着无人机数量的增加,其计算速度可提升几个数量级。     

Enhancing brand coolness through perceived luxury values: Insight from luxury fashion brands

Consumers of luxury brands have been described as seekers of products that can offer a signaling value to present to others but also a value for their self-concepts in an existentialist spirit potentially linked to being “cool or not.” Prior studies have conceptualized brand coolness and evaluated its impact on consumer responses to brands. However, few studies have contextualized the construct of brand coolness concerning luxury brand realism. We assessed the semiotic tension that luxury brand consumers feel between self-concept and self-presentation to others via a theoretical consideration of four antecedents of brand coolness: individual, social, financial, and functional luxury values; and one intentional outcome such as consumers' passionate desire to use luxury fashion brands. Our findings indicated that luxury values positively influence brand coolness, and brand coolness positively influences passionate desire. We further confirmed that brand coolness plays a complementary mediating role between luxury values and passionate desire. A final contribution is to invite brand managers to consider how luxury values and brand coolness might be used proactively to drive consumers' passionate desires in the relationships with luxury fashion brands.     

Introduction to the Special Issue - The Brave New World: How shopping and consumption is evolving with technology

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences features four articles using various methodologies to explore the interplay of technology and consumption. Through an exploration of identity expression in virtual reality to the consumption of fashion media and culture to inspiring the use of wearables, we learn that although new technologies may change traditional consumption patterns, fundamental human needs persist. From this special issue, it is evident the so-called brave new world will require companies, and marketers especially, to not lose sight of the human when using and experimenting with technologies to streamline and enhance consumption and marketplace experiences.     

More than window dressing: visual merchandising and austerity in London’s West End, 1945–50

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the fashion departments of London’s West End department stores were not only challenged by austerity and bomb damage but also by the growth of multiple retailers selling branded ready-to-wear goods. This article investigates how department stores responded by investing in display and visual merchandising to attract custom and rebuild their fashionable reputations. It argues that the difficulties caused by austerity conditions forced department stores to embrace new retail methodologies that helped them adapt to the changed circumstances of post-war fashion retail and compete with multiple retailers.     

Young consumers’ innovativeness in apparel choices: A model including consumer self‐confidence

In industries with network effects, consumer innovators help to trigger the critical mass needed for a product innovation to be successful. Thus, firms can benefit from actions that increase consumer innovativeness in their target markets. Consumer innovativeness has been associated with variables such as hedonic shopping motivation, impulsiveness and status seeking. There is limited work on the impact on consumer innovativeness of consumer characteristics that reflect consumers’ self‐confident ability to choose. This study proposes and tests a model for consumer innovativeness that incorporates variables from previous research and uncovers the importance of consumer self‐confidence. We collect survey data from 534 Chilean girls, ages 10–15. After building constructs with the help of exploratory factor analysis, we analyze the data with linear regression estimation (via OLS). Our results reveal that consumer self‐confidence is positively and significantly related to consumer innovativeness. Our findings also add evidence ‐from a younger age group‐ regarding the significance of status seeking, impulsiveness and hedonic shopping motivation on consumer innovativeness. Results suggest that companies could leverage consumer innovativeness by taking actions to increase consumers’ self‐confidence. Innovative apparel choices in young consumers could possibly also be strengthened by communicating status achievement and by enhancing shopping enjoyment.     

服装设计的环境制约

服装设计的基本出发点就是两个适应：使服装适应环境、适应使用者。环境会持续性地发生变化，而作为使用者的自然人则是相对稳定的因素。对环境诸因素的准确把握与适应是服装设计成功的关键。     

Exit from the high street: an exploratory study of sustainable fashion consumption pioneers

In today's fashion system, dominated by business models predicated on continual consumption and globalized production systems that have major environmental and social impacts, the consumption of ‘sustainable fashion’ takes on an almost paradoxical quality. This paper explores this paradox by focusing on a previously under‐researched group of consumers – ‘sustainable fashion consumption pioneers’ who actively engage and shape their own discourse around the notion of sustainable fashion consumption. These pioneers actively create and communicate strategies for sustainable fashion behaviour that can overcome the nebulous and somewhat paradoxical reality that sustainable development in the fashion industry presents. Specifically, we use passive netnography and semi‐structured interviews to illuminate the role of motivational and contextual factors that help shape these consumers' definitions of sustainable fashion including such key behaviours as purchasing fewer garments of higher quality, exiting the retail market, purchasing only second‐hand fashion goods and sewing or upgrading their own clothing. Central to much of these behaviours is the notion that personal style, rather than fashion, can bridge the potential disconnect between sustainability and fashion while also facilitating a sense of well‐being not found in traditional fashion consumption. As such, our research suggests that for these consumers sustainability is as much about reducing measurable environmental or social impacts as it is about incorporating broader concepts through which to achieve goals beyond the pro‐environmental or ethical.