Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services最新文献

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.

A considerable number of video platforms, including Bilibili and Acfun, have opted to provide bullet screens in conjunction with their video content. The question of whether and when to provide bullet screens represents a significant challenge, particularly given the variability in consumer preferences for such screens. In order to address this challenge, this paper presents a game-theoretic model for the analysis of optimal bullet screen strategies for competing media platforms. Although conventional wisdom suggests that offering bullet screens may be beneficial for video platforms, our results indicate that if the quality of bullet content is sufficiently low and the proportion of consumers who prefer bullet content is sufficiently high, both platforms have no incentive to offer bullet screens. In addition, if the quality of the bullet screen content and the proportion of consumers who prefer bullet content are moderate, only the low-quality platform will offer the bullet screen. We also find that if the quality of the bullet screen content is high enough, both platforms will provide bullet screens. Furthermore, our results show that given its competitor's bullet screen strategy (providing or not providing bullet screen features), only when the quality of bullet screen features is sufficiently large, the video platform who offers bullet screen features can set higher advertising prices. We further extend the basic model to consider asymmetric bullet screen qualities of the two platforms, and examine the impact of differences in bullet screen content quality on the optimal strategies of the video platforms. Our study provides important managerial insights for video platforms, especially on whether to provide bullet screen features in a competing environment.

The retail sector is witnessing a significant transition as Retail Service Robots (RSRs) become more widely deployed. This paper investigates the factors influencing customer acceptance of RSRs based on their interaction experiences with these robots. While existing literature predominantly examines human-robot interaction (HRI) from a technological perspective, there is a lack of focus on the social dimensions of interacting with physical robots. Through this study we are trying to fill this gap by looking into the factors that influence customer acceptance and rejection of RSRs. A qualitative study addressed this gap, gathering data from 38 participants through open-ended essays. We identified 15 dimensions clustered into two primary themes: reasons for and against RSRs customer acceptance. Reasons for consumer acceptance of RSRs include conversational agility, performance expectancy, immersion, perceived anthropomorphism, interactivity, authenticity, intimacy, and homophily. Conversely, reasons against consumer acceptance encompass vulnerability, technological complexity, exhaustion, stiff kinesics, technology readiness, social anxiety, and privacy concerns. The implication of our study extends RSRs literature by exploring crucial factors for RSRs adoption. This study also provides actionable insights for retail managers and service robot developers to build a favourable environment for RSRs adoption.

Due to its substantial ecological imprint, the fashion industry is coming under closer examination in a time of increased environmental awareness. Therefore, the interplay of ecological awareness and sustainable consumption in the fashion industry is the focus of this empirical research. This study examines the mediating role of empowerment and self-transformation between moral self-identity, ecological consciousness consumer behavior (ECCB), and consumers' purchase behaviors, along with the moderating role of religiosity. Under the Value Belief Norm theory paradigm, the hypotheses were assessed after collecting data from 542 consumers in Pakistan. The results indicate that empowerment and self-transformation mediate the relationship between self-identity and ECCB with consumers' purchase behaviors. Also, the results provide strong support for religiosity as the boundary condition. The empirical results add to the body of research by illuminating the complex relationship between environmental consciousness and actual spending behaviors, particularly in the context of fashion.

Live streaming e-commerce, as an emerging form of social media and platform, is developing rapidly in recent years. To realize rapid growth in user base, some live streaming e-commerce platforms are devoted to release positive cross-side network effects (CNEs) by introducing a key opinion leader (KOL). However, the KOL's strong ability in generating contents and promoting products would cannibalize the viewership and sales of small and medium-sized live-streamers (SMLs), leading to detrimental same-side network effects (SNEs) that hinder the growth of the user base. In this paper, we consider the joint influence of CNEs and SNEs to investigate the KOL introduction strategy and pricing decision of live streaming e-commerce platforms, and analyze the impacts of the KOL introduction on platforms' equilibrium decisions and user participation. Our finding indicates that network effects significantly affect pricing strategy only when platforms introduce the KOL. In this case, it could be more advantageous for platforms to subsidize SMLs with weak CNE intensity while charging the KOL with strong CNE intensity. Moreover, our paper also reveals an interesting result. Although the platforms improve (reduce) the entry fee on SMLs, the access quantities of SMLs still increase (decrease) when the KOL entries. Finally, our analysis reveals that the platforms may introduce the KOL even though its negative SNE intensity on SMLs is strong, while may not introduce when its negative SNE intensity on SMLs is weak.