Journal of Retailing最新文献

This conceptual article explores why consumers visit physical stores—despite living in a digital-first world—and presents potential ways for retailers to further encourage offline shopping. Although online retailing tends to offer the greatest convenience, brick-and-mortar outlets can offer an immersive in-store experience that combines convenience and interest. The present exposition considers store features within a 2 × 2 typology of convenience and interest and illustrates how these features contribute, or fail to contribute, to immersive in-store experiences. Other factors, such as ambient stimuli that elicit sensory- and aesthetic pleasure, provide additional paths to immersion. The notions raised may serve as a basis for future research avenues in immersive retailing.

Retailers are accelerating direct marketing efforts to reach consumers, and increasingly integrating telephone numbers in online and offline advertisements to generate direct response. The telephone channel is a channel for both lead generation and sales, and yet its effectiveness for direct sales is unexplored. We provide a novel investigation of the effects of online and offline advertising (search advertising, banner advertising, general print advertising and specialty print advertising) on inbound telephone sales using a unique channel-specific telephone sales dataset. We make four findings: banner advertising, typically suited for exposure-based objectives in online and offline channels, is in fact more effective than search advertising to influence inbound telephone sales in both the short term and long term; print advertising is useful for generating inbound telephone sales; there are synergies for advertising in general (non-product focused) and specialty print (product focused) media; and online advertising is complementary to offline advertising and influences inbound telephone sales from print media. These results highlight that the combinations of advertising sources that effectively generate inbound telephone sales are different from those observed to influence sales in other channels, and have important managerial implications.

Many retailers (e.g., Amazon, Walmart) use various types of online recommendation agents (RAs) on their websites to suggest goods and services to consumers. These RAs screen millions of options to ease consumers’ information search and evaluation. To determine which RA types best support consumers’ efforts, the present research reports a meta-analysis of perceived recommendation quality research, a key performance metric that gauges RAs from consumers’ perspectives. To test the framework derived from this meta-analysis, the authors rely on data gathered from 32,172 consumers, reported in 122 samples. The results affirm that some RAs perform better than others in leveraging the effects of perceived recommendation quality on consumers’ decision-making satisfaction, RA satisfaction, and intention to use the RA in the future. The best performing RAs feature specific algorithms (i.e., collaborative filtering, interactive RAs, and self-serving recommendations), recommendation presentations (i.e., solicited recommendation), and data sources (i.e., location-based and social network–based RAs). Moreover, the results suggest that some RAs perform better than others in leveraging the effects of decision-making and RA satisfaction on future use intentions. These insights advance RA theory and provide guidance for managers, with regard to choosing the optimal RA.

Over the past few years, traditional big-box retailers such as Walmart and Target have increasingly opened small-format stores. Venturing into small-format retailing requires a rethink of product assortment, as this strategy involves truncating assortment variety. Literature suggests that consumers are less attracted by retailers that offer a small variety of product options, as small assortments are associated with the fear of not having much choice, which threatens consumers’ need for personal control. The present paper provides small-size retailers or service providers with an approach to enhance the attractiveness of their assortments. With six studies the authors show that highlighting supply abundance—by creating a sense of abundant availability of each product option within an assortment—compensates for the lowered sense of personal control that consumers may experience with a small assortment. Consequently, it enhances consumers’ evaluation of small assortments. The positive effect of supply abundance is mitigated when consumers review a large assortment or when product options are highly curated, as sense of personal control has likely been satisfied in those cases.

Inflation is back – with a vengeance. Following the highly disruptive years of the pandemic, the world has experienced inflation levels not seen for many decades. A “perfect storm” of underlying causes including expansionary monetary and fiscal policies during the pandemic, pent‑up demand, supply-demand imbalances and commodity-driven cost pressures due to unfavorable weather conditions in various regions and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, all conspired to steeply increase consumer price levels around the world. While current inflation levels are not unprecedented (they were even higher in the 1970s and 1980s), the decades-long period of extremely low inflation experienced in most countries means that current inflation rates continue to shock consumers, manufacturers and retailers. Equally, academic research has very little to say about how to conduct marketing in inflationary times, and that is why this paper presents an overview of what we know, what we don't know and what we argue we should know in the form of a research agenda.

We first review key takeaways from prior inflation-focused research in the marketing literature, along with insights that could be derived from related studies that considered other causes of disposable-income reductions. However, given that the inflation literature is sparse, while insights from other forms of disposable-income reduction may not automatically generalize to the current inflationary setting, we identify various knowledge gaps along with a wide-ranging set of questions in need of further research in marketing and retailing. We do so, in the spirit of the Empirics-First approach to relevant knowledge generation, by identifying several frequently used retailer-initiated coping strategies. We subsequently circle back to pertinent prior literature to help with the interpretation of the observed patterns, identify best practices, and warn against potential pitfalls. We hope that this article will inspire cutting-edge research into the consumer-, retailer- and marketing consequences of extreme inflation, a worldwide problem that affects us all and is directly linked to the core role of retailing in the supply-chain channel.

Organizational identification (OI) – which is defined as a sense of oneness with the organization – has consistently been found to increase frontline employee (FLE) job performance. However, whether these performance gains are uniform across different types of frontline jobs (e.g., retail clerks vs. financial advisors) and performance outcomes (e.g., behavioral vs. financial) has yet to be determined. Consequently, frontline managers lack the guidance necessary to decide whether or when they should prioritize investments in OI as a mechanism for achieving organizational performance goals. We begin to redress this knowledge gap through a meta-analytic investigation of the OI-FLE performance relationship, which reveals: (a) an overall positive effect of OI on FLE job performance, (b) job meaningfulness (i.e., job autonomy, skill variety and task significance) weakens the OI-FLE job performance relationship, and (c) this weakening is more pronounced in the case of behavioral and customer (but not financial) performance outcomes. Our study findings thus suggest retail managers should prioritize investments in OI when their goal is to promote desirable FLE behaviors and in situations where the work cannot be made meaningful due to job design constraints (e.g., when providing FLEs autonomy is not possible because the work must be performed in a prespecified manner at a predetermined time).

This study investigates the interplay between two critical phenomena in retailing, i.e., internationalization and digitalization, while accounting for retail sector differences. On one hand, internationalization allows retailers to access a wider range of markets, and on the other, digital channel expansion enhances customer reach and convenience within international markets. More specifically, we examine the relationship between retailer internationalization and performance (I-P relationship), and how this relationship is contingent upon the idiosyncrasies of retail sectors (i.e., grocery vs. non-grocery), digitalization, and their combined effects. Building on the liability of foreignness perspective, we first argue that the I-P relationship is U-shaped, because internationalizing retailers initially incur greater costs in their international expansion owing to their unfamiliarity with foreign markets, but as their foreign presence increases, they benefit from greater market power, experience, and scale economies. Then, we contend that as grocers suffer from higher levels of liability of foreignness due to increased requirements for host country embeddedness, non-grocers benefit more from internationalization with any gains and losses further amplified by digitalization. Hypotheses are tested against a panel of the 234 largest international retailers in the world over a 21-year period (1997–2017) and findings support the conjectures.

Understanding purchase motivations is vital but challenging due to their unobservable, concomitant, and dynamic nature. Recent research has proposed frameworks to examine their impact on choice by treating motivations as latent states. This study contributes to this line of research by introducing the notion of “episode-specific motive adjustment,” that accounts for variations in consumers' willingness to pursue specific motives during a shopping trip. Utilizing this concept, the study uncovers valuable insights into how different types of purchase motivations influence consumer product interactions and choices. Analyzing a comprehensive dataset from multiple Indian cities, the research contributes to a theoretical understanding of and practical applications for businesses seeking to comprehend and influence consumer behavior. Theoretically, we show that consumers display diverse patterns of in-store product engagement behavior as they adjust the intensity of instrumental and experiential motives across purchase episodes. Furthermore, we illustrate that the relationship between willingness to pursue a motive (motive intensity) and the likelihood of making a choice follows distinct functional patterns. We highlight the significance of considering individual-level heterogeneity and dynamic behavioral patterns to enhance consumer experiences and purchase decisions. Practically, this research identifies the key drivers that influence motive intensity in stores, providing managers with insights to optimize store layouts and effectively influence consumer purchase motives that align with their business objectives. Emphasis is placed on context-specific strategies, as the impact of these drivers varies with purchase context.