Retail Trends

7 Key excerpts on "Retail Trends"

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  Strategic Marketing Decision-Making within Japanese and South Korean Companies

  • Yang-Im Lee, Peter Trim(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Chandos Publishing

    (Publisher)

  McGoldrick (1990: 3) and Omar (1999: 3) have pointed out that retail organizations such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Marks & Spencer are market-led; however, many retail organizations see themselves as marketing-oriented. Retailing covers a number of areas and sometimes retail organizations/retailing operations are different across industries. Bearing these points in mind, it needs to be pointed out that retailing, which involves seasonal factors which warrant a quick return on investment, is to be placed in a different retailing context than retailing which is not heavily influenced by seasonal factors and where the industry life cycle is different. Various concepts and models such as the wheel of retailing, the dialectical process, the retail life cycle, the retail accordion theory (McGoldrick, 1990: 15–18; Omar, 1999: 8–13), environment theory (Etgar, 1984; Davies, 1998; McIvor et al., 1997) and conflict theory are important factors to bear in mind. All of these concepts and models can be used in order to diagnose the situation within the retail environment, and to provide insights into future strategic direction. Etgar (1984: 42) has made a useful observation when stating that retailing was missing a comprehensive theory relating to change. Etgar 148 Strategic Marketing Decision-Making (1984) has provided a reasonably comprehensive outline of changes in the retailing sector and has drawn upon various aspects of theory (especially non-management related theory) in order to put forward the retail ecology model. Several aspects of Etgar’s (1984: 46–7) retail ecology model are worth mentioning, especially the characteristics of retailing variety which include both an internal and an external dimension. Etgar (1984: 52–5) is right to highlight the influence of competition as it is competition that results in the process of natural selection and is responsible for a particular outcome (domination of one group over another).

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  Urban and Rural Change in West Germany

  • Trevor Wild(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5    TRENDS IN CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AND RETAILING Gareth Shaw

  Since the 1950s changes in methods of retailing in West Germany have been on such a scale that not only have they transformed the distributive sector of the economy, but have also exerted far-reaching influences on its spatial distribution. The new methodology has stemmed from a virtual revolution in retail technology and organisation. This was fostered by the interaction of several general economic and social trends, each helping to create new conditions and new directions of consumer demand. However, the relationships between consumer demand, retail technology and business response have never been completely freed from conservative influences. Paramount amongst these is the interventionist effect of public policy.

  Intervention in the Retailing Field

  West Germany, like most other west European countries, does not have a clearly defined public policy and attitude towards retailing, but rather a complex set of mechanisms that to different degrees intervene in the distributive sector. This lack of a coherent approach can be accounted for by the fact that past efforts have mainly gone into exercising control over the primary and secondary sectors of the economy, with much less regard being given to major tertiary activities. However, with the changing-balance of employment in what is now a post-industrial society, the tertiary sector has become pre-eminently important. The recognition of this new status means that more thought is now being directed to the formulation of effective retail policies. It is appropriate to view this development by paying attention to the temporal perspective, and from the outset to the importance in the immediate postwar years of the creation of the West German version of the market economy.

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  Employee Training And U.s. Competitiveness

  Lessons For The 1990s

  • Lauren Benton(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 The Retailing Industry

  The retailing sector has been profoundly affected by broad changes in the world economy since 1975. The nature of competition has changed, and new types of retailers and products have appeared to fill increasingly diverse market niches. In the process, firms have altered the way they recruit and use labor, from management levels to the lowest-level store positions. These changes are significant because they affect a large segment of the labor force: Retailing accounted for 17 percent of all nonagricultural jobs in 1987; it is the largest employer of young workers and a major employer of women.

  This chapter outlines the broad trends affecting retailing strategies since the late 1970s and analyzes their implications for firm-based training. An overview of trends in marketing and subsector restructuring is followed by a discussion of employment and training strategies.1

  Retailing has relied extensively on organizational transformation, changing recruitment strategies, and a new emphasis on training to adjust to the new marketplace. A detailed look at recruitment and training in one firm at the end of this chapter will help bring these points into sharper focus.

  The Changing Competitive Environment and New Modes of Retailing

  Retailing has been dramatically affected by the changing consumption patterns described in the first part of this book. Market segmentation and differentiation, together with other trends such as the aging of the baby boomers and an increase in two-earner families, have not only made traditional markets more varied but have opened vast new markets that also tend to be highly volatile. Thus, the burgeoning demand for work and leisure apparel, quickly prepared food, and home furnishings, to name just a few examples, illustrates highly fragmented demand for products catering to different tastes and budgets.

  As the number and variety of products have increased, so has competition for shelf space in stores. Producers can no longer be aloof from the retailing stage but must develop closer contact with store managers and buyers in order to both ensure a place for their goods and monitor the market. For retailers, in turn, merchandising has become much more important as organizations have vied to distinguish themselves from competitors through a sharper and more focused selection of goods. And at all levels in retailing, a greater emphasis must be placed on interacting with customers, both as a way of developing customer loyalty and as a means for becoming more sensitive to changes in demand.

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  Rethinking Marketing

  Towards Critical Marketing Accountings

  • Douglas Brownlie, Michael Saren, Robin Wensley, Richard Whittington, Douglas Brownlie, Michael Saren, Robin Wensley, Richard Whittington(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  1 8 Research in Marketing: Some Trends, Some Recommendations Gilles Laurent and Bernard Pras This chapter outlines some key trends in marketing research and their implications for the future. While it is based on the recent book Research Traditions in Marketing, edited by ourselves and Gary Lilien ( 1 994), it does not describe the state of the art in marketing research or provide a compre-hensive review of the literature covering all research traditions. Rather, it gives the authors ' viewpoint on selected topics. Three main changes, in the last 10 years, have been (1) a more realistic view of consumers and markets, (2) more focus on real problems, and (3) a broader conception of marketing research. A more realistic view of consumers and markets In other parts of this book, it is argued that the behaviour of consumers may be changing in many different ways. In this section, we develop a slightly different argument, namely that, even if that behaviour does not change, research in marketing has changed, and will change, in depth. This results from two main causes: better data, and alternative approaches (alternative theoretical bases and assumptions). Better data We are in the midst of an information revolution, in which more and better data become available. These data describe the behaviour of individual consumers, aggregate consumer behaviour, causes of both, as well as actions taken by manufacturers and retailers. Similar tendencies are at work for industrial marketing data. There are three main trends. First, scanner data are becoming available in more and more countries. Be they at the store or at the household level, they give a much more precise view of real purchase behaviour and, perhaps more importan tly, of many causes of that behaviour.

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  Strategic Marketing for Success in Retailing

  • A. Coskun Samli(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 Adjusting Retail Marketing Strategies to Consumer Behavior Understanding consumer behavior, by definition, implies understanding the underlying factors that would lead the consumer to decide what, where, when, and how he or she will buy apparel (Schiffman and Kanuk 1994). This chapter presents a general consumer behavior model that di- rectly applies to retailing. The approach that is used in constructing this model is eclectic. The model draws from numerous consumer be- havior theories and research efforts to make our knowledge of con- sumer behavior more applicable to retailing. The model presented in this chapter explores the consumer behav- ior principles that are related to store selection and store patronage activities. If the retailer understands these processes, then he or she can attract consumers to his or her store. However, store selection and store patronage decisions are very complex. They are influenced by cultural, socioeconomic, and racial factors, along with lifestyle characteristics and educational backgrounds, among other numerous internal and external factors that influence behavior. It must be understood that the retailer cannot possibly change internal factors, such as personal- ity or cultural background, but he or she can significantly influence (or at least work with) the external variables, such as socioeconomic and racial characteristics. A CONSUMER BEHAVIOR MODEL IS NEEDED The retail decision maker is vitally interested in three specific phases of consumer behavior that are related to retailing. The first is pre-

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  Geography and Retailing

  • Peter Scott(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5Retail Trends AND SPATIAL COMPETITION

  So far we have considered an essentially static pattern of retail establishments. Yet in the long run both the real income of the community and sales productivity in retailing tend to rise, so that the relative number of shops selling necessary goods tends to fall and the relative number of shops selling luxuries tends to increase. Ford (1935, 1936) has shown that as a result of these conflicting trends over the period 1901–31 the number of shops relative to population in twelve British towns declined slightly. Similarly from 1950 to 1966, when these divergent trends are measurable from British census data, the total number of retail establishments in Britain continued to decline slowly. Similar trends are evident in almost all Western countries (cf. e.g. Dunn, 1962).

  Such small movements in total shop numbers mask a pattern of continual and substantial change. In Sale, a municipal borough in the south-east Lancashire conurbation, the number of shops increased from 493 to 511 between 1951 and 1962, an increase of 4 per cent (Carruthers, 1963). But the total number of shops changing ownership (163) or going out of business (112) or entering the industry (147) was almost as great as the total provision of shops in Sale at the beginning of the period. Even in Bond Street, London, where highly specialised trading in a highly segmented market might be expected to minimise the extent of change, one-quarter of all the retail establishments present in June 1964 had changed in ownership and/or trade by November 1968. Imperfect though competition might be it would nevertheless seem to be pervasive.

  It is therefore necessary to have regard to both the general long-term trends in retailing and the short-term movements resulting primarily from competition. Important in the long run are changes both in the structure of retailing and in the structure of the market. On the supply side the basic variables are changes in retail establishments by type of trade and technology, by forms of organisation, and by scale of operation. On the demand side there are changes in the distribution and socioeconomic structure of the population, in the mode of consumer travel, frequency of purchase, income and expenditure patterns, and so on. An analysis of spatial competition also invokes not only these demand variables but also the entry of new establishments, product differentiation, price competition, and competition by service. Although American marketing geography now contains numerous well-documented studies of competition deriving from the location of new stores there remains a dearth of geographical example from other countries. Moreover, there is still a relatively small literature on the geography of both the long-term trends in retailing and of other aspects of retail competition.

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  Textiles, Identity and Innovation: In Touch

  Proceedings of the 2nd International Textile Design Conference (D_TEX 2019), June 19-21, 2019, Lisbon, Portugal

  • Gianni Montagna, Manuela Cristina Paulo Carvalho Figueiredo, Gianni Montagna, Manuela Cristina Paulo Carvalho Figueiredo(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Vejlgaard (2008) suggests that trends are more predictable than people might think, given that they are sociological processes involving the human being, and human behaviour collectively tends to be relatively predictable. The approaches to consumer behaviour are, moreover, one of the central pillars of trends studies (Rech & Silveira, 2017). 164 According to Campos and Rech (2010), these studies attribute a communicative value to consumption which involves the practice of not only monetary exchanges but also of social and cultural symbolism. Through a continuous debate in which new fashions are systematically adopted, and new trends are dif-fused, the consumer -central entity in the market dynamics -has become incredibly powerful. More than ever, ‘ production in fl uences consumption, and consumption in fl uences production ’ (Kawamura, 2004). Whether in the recreational or gastronomic sector; in the fashion industry, or the pharmaceutical industry; whether in China, India, Brazil or the United States, the consumer is the central character (Higham, 2009). In effect, it is for the consumer that the products are created and the services are directed. It is the consumer who adopts, consequently estab-lishes a trend, and fi nally, it is the consumer who decides to abandon old attitudes, behaviours, and products, resulting in the inevitable decline of a trend. This last idea points to a key consumer factor -the fact that they regularly change their attitudes and behaviours. Changes affect their consumption pat-terns as their needs evolve (Kjaer, 2014), which in turn give impetus to new trends and devalue domin-ant ones. This aspect emphasizes consumer power as it compels companies to recognize and adapt to these changes (Higham, 2009).

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