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This paper seeks to provide an overview of the growing popularity of slotting fees and their potential for abuse that led to congressional hearings as well as investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and the General Accounting Office, respectively. It also aims to discuss the widespread use of promotional allowances and their potential for abuse, leading to accounting irregularities.

It focuses on how promotional allowances have been improperly accounted for at Royal Ahold, Fleming Companies and AmerisourceBergen Corp. By reviewing how the Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) overhauled the accounting rules, it sheds some light on the magnitude of these practices.

The FASB failed to go far enough in its crack‐down. It reveals that heavy reliance on these allowances by financially weak retailers can be a red flag to current and potential investors, both professional and individual. However, the post‐Enron accounting rule changes and the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act are forcing CEOs and CFOs of publicly traded companies to rethink how to account for these allowances. Additionally, while the vast majority of grocery chains dabble in the slotting ritual, the world's largest retailer and the world's largest commissary do not demand and do not accept slotting fees.

By reviewing a limited sample of the literature, this study offers some guidelines for conducting future research.

Seeks to better understand whether a retailer's trust in a manufacturer is a key concept in their motivation to allocate resources to those manufacturers with whom they have a long‐term relationship compared with economical motivations.

A survey research method is used to study all customers from three large manufacturers in The Netherlands. These retailers had to answer questions about their trust in a manufacturer, the manufacturer's investments in the relationship, and their marketing efforts. Questions were also asked about the allocation of their own scarce resources for the manufacturer, specifically their adoption of in‐store marketing campaigns initiated by the manufacturer. Structural equation models and regression analyses were employed.

Trust is not that important, but the manufacturer's investments in the brand are the most important predictors. However, interaction effects were also found: trust interacts with investments in the brand to influence resource allocations. It was also found that personal contact of salespeople of the manufacturer with managers at store as well as their contact with headquarters had an effect on resource allocation. This is conceived to be an indication that people at headquarters take into consideration how people at the floor level evaluate the brands and their effects on customers when making resource allocation decisions. In other words, retailer chains have complex buying centers.

A large set of customers was analyzed from three different manufacturers, but customers could have been investigated from many manufacturers.

Retailers respond to manufacturers mainly with economic motivations (e.g. what is the value of this brand for my own firm?). However, trust at times interacts with these economic motivations. This means that manufacturers should invest both in the relationship with the retailer and in their brands, if they want to motivate the retailer to allocate scarce resources (e.g. time).

This paper identifies important factors that influence retailer behavior that have not been studied within a fast‐moving retail context.

Discusses the research opportunities brought about by the adoption of category management in the food industry and suggests reasons why category management might be of interest to academics. Reviews contemporary research and proposes a multidisciplinary research agenda which crosses the academic‐industrial interface. Suggests four principal research themes: beneficiaries and benefits of category management; the process of organizational change; the management of categories; and the implications of category management adoption. Discusses these themes in the context of research already undertaken and details areas meriting closer investigation.

For most frequently purchased packaged goods distributed in the super‐hypermarket channel, the store is where a manufacturer's brand can develop its image and its evaluation through an informal control on the purchase experience. Yet, for brands in this sector, better controlled in‐store purchase experiences can lead to enhance brand perceived value, relationship quality, and loyalty. To capture how these contacts take place, the authors develop the concept of in‐store manufacturer brand expression. This concept encompasses three dimensions, namely perceived quality of in‐store manufacturer brand presentation, in‐store manufacturer brand image expression, and perceived closeness of brand image with store image. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of these components on brand evaluations. An empirical application on brands of the food and intimate apparel categories shows the differential impacts of these components on perceived value, relationship quality (trust‐credibility, trust‐benevolence, affective commitment), and attitudinal loyalty.

The empirical application involves major brands positioned in frequently purchased packaged goods categories (ice cream, frozen meals and intimate apparel) and distributed in the super‐hypermarket channel over which they have no formal control. The conceptualization and measurement of perceived brand relationship orientation bears on a qualitative analysis of marketing experts and consumers. Refinement and validation of measures are applied to a convenience sample of 153 students and finally on a sample of 304 actual consumers. Structural equation modeling was used to test the model and hypotheses.

Perceived quality of in‐store brand presentation has a direct positive effect on brand value and trust‐credibility whereas in‐store brand image expression has direct positive impact on trust‐benevolence and affective commitment. At the same time, perceived closeness of brand manufacturer image with store image has a direct negative impact on trust‐credibility. In addition, the authors observed that these effects have significant indirect positive and negative consequences on attitudinal loyalty, throughout the causal links which exist between value, trust and affective commitment. Also, the authors' results support the relationship marketing model in the case of strong national brands positioned in the frequently purchased packaged goods sector.

The application is limited to only three product categories and to strong national brands which enjoy high levels of awareness and market share. Also, the model could be connected to behavioural loyalty metrics, in addition to attitudinal loyalty.

Conceptualization of perceived brand relationship orientation in the case of frequently purchased packaged goods categories is a new step in the understanding and management of consumer‐brand relationship and mass market channel policies.

This paper focuses on the role of manufacturer brands for resellers within retail channels. This topic is important because of the strategic value of manufacturer brands and the increasing influence of resellers within channels of distribution. Much of the branding research emphasizes a customer-brand knowledge perspective; however, emerging perspectives suggest that brands are also relevant to other stakeholders including resellers. In contrast, channels research recognizes the manufacturer sources of market power, but does not consider the impact of manufacturer “push and pull” strategies within channels. Existing theoretical frameworks, therefore, do not address the reseller perspective of the brand. As a result, the research approach is a multi-method design, consisting of two phases. The first phase involves in-depth interviews, allowing the development of a conceptual framework. In the second phase, a survey of supermarket buyers on brands in several product categories tests this framework. Structural equation modeling analyzes the survey responses and tests the hypotheses. The structural model shows very good fit to the data with good construct validity, reliability, and stability. The findings show that manufacturer support, brand equity, and customer demand reflect the manufacturer brand benefits to resellers. A key contribution of this research is the development of a validated scale on manufacturer brand benefits from the point of view of a reseller. This research shows that the resources that relate to the brand, not just the brand name itself, create value for resellers in channel relationships.

This paper aims to present an approach to detect interrelations among product categories, which are then used to produce a partition of a retailer’s business into subsets of categories. The methodology also yields a segmentation of shopping trips based on the composition of each shopping basket.

This work uses scanner data to uncover product category interdependencies. As the number of possible relationships among them can be very large, the authors introduce an approach that generates an intuitive graphical representation of these interrelationships by using data analysis techniques available in standard statistical packages, such as multidimensional scaling and clustering.

The methodology was validated using data from a supermarket store. The analysis for that particular store revealed four groups of products categories that are often jointly purchased. The study of each of these groups allowed us to conceive the retail store under study as a small set of sub-businesses. These conclusions reinforce the strategic need for proactive coordination of marketing activities across interrelated product categories.

The approach is sufficiently general to be applied beyond the supermarket industry. However, the empirical findings are specific to the store under analysis. In addition, the proposed methodology identifies cross-category interrelations, but not their underlying sources (e.g. marketing or non-marketing interrelations).

The results suggest that retailers could potentially benefit if they transition from the traditional category management approach where retailers manage product categories in isolation into a customer management approach where retailers identify, acknowledge and leverage interrelations among product categories.

The authors present a fast and wide-range approach to study the shopping behavior of customers, detect cross-category interrelations and segment the retailer’s business and customers based on information about their shopping baskets. Compared to existing approaches, its simplicity should facilitate its implementation by practitioners.

As a supply chain management initiative, category management has to date been the almost exclusive preserve of the grocery sector and, within that sector, limited to food categories. This paper proposes that the fashion industry might usefully follow the grocery industry's lead and implement category management. A comprehensive review of the literature on category management highlights the opportunity for fashion marketing to consider the potential of category management, and the specific research gaps. In operationalising the subsequent research objectives, the paper reports the results of exploratory, in‐depth consumer research for a particular category of intimate apparel. The managerial implications of these findings are then discussed in the context of the established eight‐step category management process. The overall tentative conclusion of this study is that as a consumer‐oriented joint planning tool, category management offers retailer‐supplier partnerships in the fashion industry an important adjunct to the industry's quick response methods. The paper closes with an agenda for future research.

A report on UK supermarkets published by the Competition Commission in October 2000 concluded that there was evidence that multiple food retailers were abusing their position of power and engaging in practices that adversely affected the competitiveness of suppliers. To address these adverse effects it was recommended that a code of practice be introduced to govern retailer‐supplier relationships. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is co‐ordinating a project that is designed to monitor the extent to which multiple retailers are complying with the principles set out in the code of practice. This paper presents the findings of exploratory research, conducted as part of this project, to investigate suppliers’ current perceptions of the fairness of their trading relationships with the multiple retailers.

To assess the weight and extent of control possessed by manufacturers over category management (CM) tactics in contemporary distribution channels for fast‐moving consumer goods; and to analyse the origins of this control.

A survey study conducted among Finnish manufacturers of fast‐moving consumer goods. A total of 420 questionnaires were sent out. Of these, 84 questionnaires were returned, of which 83 were satisfactorily completed for use in the analysis.

The study reveals that manufacturers believe that retailers are clearly in charge of CM tactics. However, large manufacturers seem to possess a relatively strong weight of control in CM decision making, whereas small manufacturers possess little weight of control. The origins of manufacturers' control are mostly non‐coercive in nature.

This study has approached CM from the perspective of manufacturing organisations. The phenomenon could also be approached from the retailers' or a dyadic perspective. It would be fruitful to conduct comparative studies in other national settings. Conceptual and qualitative empirical studies are needed to obtain a clearer understanding of the phenomenon.

The study suggests that manufacturers who wish to gain some control over CM tactics should base their interaction with retailers on expertise and issues related to referent power bases.

This paper offers new perspectives on CM by examining the concept of power within manufacturer‐retailer relationships.