This study pioneers a transformative approach to defining and measuring retail catchment areas, moving from traditional isochrone-based models to a behavioural, evidence-based framework that capitalises on mobile location data. Departing from conventional methods that rely on static geographic boundaries or potential travel times, we employ geofencing and geohash techniques to map the actual movements and behaviours of shoppers. This research offers an understanding of retail catchment areas by analysing an extensive dataset with over 117 million data points from approximately 1.6 million users in Auckland. Utilising the DBSCAN clustering algorithm and the concave hull method, we analyse and visualise the geographic extent of catchment areas based on the home-like locations of mall visitors. This refined approach enables us to deepen our comprehension of consumer travel patterns and shopping motivations, empowering retail managers to craft more targeted marketing and operational strategies. Our findings reveal marked deviations from traditionally assumed catchment boundaries, providing fresh insights into consumer behaviour and market dynamics. By redefining catchment areas to reflect actual consumer behaviour and spatial interactions, this research underscores the critical need for more data-driven approaches in the retail sector to adapt to evolving consumer preferences and behaviours.
Our study aims to provide a new perspective on the relationship between consumer innovativeness (i.e., social, functional, cognitive, and hedonic) and global purchases by considering consumers’ global product learning and store managers’ interactions with consumers. Using structural equation modeling on data from 500 Japanese consumers, our findings reveal that global product learning fully mediates the impact of diverse aspects of consumer innovativeness (excluding the non-significant functional sub-dimension) on consumers’ global product purchase behavior. Additionally, we highlight the critical role of store managers in influencing consumer behavior toward global products by demonstrating that store managers’ interactions with consumers strengthen the effect of consumers’ global product learning on their purchase behavior. Our results offer significant insights into the dynamics of consumer innovativeness and the impact of store managers on global product purchases, thereby filling a gap in the retailing and marketing literature.
Although walking is ubiquitous and regularly produces footstep sounds, little is known about how such sounds impact (1) observer impressions of walkers, and (2) walker influence over observers. The current research addresses these issues in three retailing scenario-based experiments. The presence of service employees' footstep sounds is found to increase their perceived status in the eyes of the shoppers, which increases the service employees' persuasiveness. Moreover, we rule-out several potential alternative explanations (niceness, attractiveness, and honesty) while identifying a boundary condition of both theoretical and practical significance, shoppers' political ideology: service employees’ footstep sounds affect conservative shoppers far more than liberal shoppers.
Blockchain technology has properties that improve supply chain transparency, traceability, and accountability, but how important are these security features to the consumer? This study investigates, consumers' willingness to choose and pay a premium for blockchain-certified food products. The major findings of this study are that consumers show positive receptiveness towards blockchain and disfavour unethical food production methods revealing sustainability consciousness guiding their consumption. We find that females place a greater value on food transparency and product labelling verification and are more willing to pay a premium. In addition, the results have important marketing implications according to our choice modeling findings.