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Defines a particular form of returned purchases and explores its pervasiveness. Consumers who engage in “retail borrowing” purchase items with the deliberate intention to return such items once they have been used satisfactorily. To facilitate the purchases of good and to act responsibly when purchased items may be defective retailers have extended generous return policies to consumers. Increasingly however some consumers have taken advantage of such policies to “borrow” needed items from retailers. Provides an insight into retail borrowing and the type of most commonly “borrowed” products. Also identifies reasons that trigger the willingness to “borrow” from retailers and discuss the emotions and thoughts that accompany the behavior. Discusses the managerial and social perspectives of the phenomenon.

The country‐of‐origin effect and product consumption conspicuousness are examined. This study strengthens our understanding of the importance of the COO effect as it is investigated with respect to consumers’ purchasing intentions of public vs. private and luxury vs. necessity products. For instance, does the COO effect differ in its importance in the purchasing decision of conspicuous vs. inconspicuous products? A product’s country of origin has a stronger effect when considering luxury products. The conspicuous aspect of the consumption comes second.

Following the upheavals of the revolutionary era, the People's Republic of China's consumer culture is somewhat over 20 years old. This research aims at discovering and thus better understanding what Chinese consumers value most among their possessions. In turn, this finding should help better understand the contemporary Chinese culture.

The general research approach utilized in this effort is qualitative. All data were collected through at‐home, in‐depth personal interviews, following established guidelines outlined by Lincoln and Guba, and Wallendorf and Belk. A snowball sampling resulted in the participation of 20 rural and 20 urban households.

Participants' demographic profile ended up matching well the national profile in terms of income, and the gender and age make‐up of the rural and urban samples were not significantly different. Four categories emerged to comprehensively represent all the favorite products identified by the participants: entertainment, functional, hedonic, and mementos. In addition, a numerically significant number of participants could neither think of a favorite product nor possess one. As developed in the paper, conventional typologies, such as Hofstede and Triandis' collectivism‐individualism do not account well for the results observed in this study. Rather, the study turns towards Lu's research and suggestion that using instruments developed by Western cultures suffer from methodological defects when applied to Chinese behaviors. This research then defines the Yi, a Confucian value related to benevolence, morality, righteousness, and the Li, a Mohist/Legalist value related to utilitarianism and profit, and suggests that the two better help understand the findings and support observations.

The nature of qualitative research clearly limits the generalization of its findings, and therefore to offer more definitive results, future efforts would have to consider other methods. Also, and while great care is taken to ensure the validity of the data collection process, there is always the possibility that some respondents may not have been as candid or truthful as would be hoped. However, and altogether, findings from this research do match well what public media have often been reporting, and what frequent casual observations point out.

China's contemporary culture is rapidly changing, somehow breaking away from traditions, yet retaining core values and reshaping them with modern, sometimes alien inputs. This research clearly indicates what motivates the younger generations, raised in a nation governed by an all‐controlling Communist party that orchestrates an openly capitalistic, materialistic societal development. Such apparent contradictions, the result of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” may be puzzling to some in the Western world but are not so with today's Chinese consumers.

This research is unique in its topic and research approach, given that it deals with Chinese consumers, the largest block of consumers in the world. It offers a perspective, not yet considered within the marketing and consumer research literature, that seems to explain well what is observed.

Retail leakages caused by an increasing number of outshopping to other countries has become a growing concern among retailers in border areas. This research seeks to examine the shopping behaviour and attitudes of Singaporeans in neighboring Malaysia and, specifically, the influence of demographic and retail characteristics on outshopping. The importance of various types of secondary costs of outshopping and the impact of consumer ethnocentrism on attitudes toward outshopping are also explored. Findings reveal that food, beverage and grocery products are the most commonly outshopped items. Competitive prices and ample parking space are major reasons for outshopping frequently. Frequent outshoppers perceive fewer secondary costs than infrequent outshoppers and, as a whole, they do not feel unwelcome or guilty when outshopping. In short, this research suggests that, as consumers engage in outshopping primarily for economic reasons, they do not experience a lack of national pride or low consumer ethnocentrism.

This chapter considers social purpose venturing as a vehicle for addressing social exclusion in the rural developing world, illustrated with reference to case examples across a range of East and Southern African countries.

Data was collected during in-depth case study research with social purpose ventures in various African countries. Qualitative research methods were primarily employed including interviews, stakeholder focus groups and observational research.

Six channels through which social purpose ventures contribute to tackling social exclusion amongst rural BoP communities are identified. These include ventures with the BoP as employees, producers, consumers, entrepreneurs, service users and shareholders. Characteristics for successful social purpose ventures are also discussed.

The chapter adds to knowledge in the field of social purpose venturing in the developing world. It identifies various channels through which such ventures help tackle rural social exclusion and also factors influencing their success.

The chapter provides insights for practitioners and policy makers, particularly in relation to facilitating successful social purpose venturing.

This chapter contributes to better practice in rural development in the Global South.

Insights relevant to academic and practitioner audiences are provided, as the chapter addresses a subject area and region that have received limited attention.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the decision-making process used by luxury fashion retail buyers in Greece in order to assess the applicability of Sheth's (1981) model to the selection of brands and collections by retail buyers in luxury fashion resellers.

The study takes an interpretive approach, utilising participant observation and semi-structured interviews with retail buyers in five luxury fashion reseller companies in Greece, which boasts the world's highest proportion of luxury fashion consumers. Qualitative data were analysed thematically according to the theoretical constructs in Sheth's (1981) model of merchandise buyer behaviour.

Brand reputation, quality, appropriateness for the market and exclusive distribution were the most important criteria for supplier selection. For evaluating merchandise, the most important criteria were design, style, fashionability and quality. The most relevant influencer of decision making in supplier selection was the competitive structure in terms of the power balance between retailer and brand. For merchandise selection, the most relevant influencing factors were retailer size, management mentality, product positioning and type of decision (re-buy or new task).

Due to the exploratory nature of the study and its focus on the context of a particular geographical marketplace, the findings may not be generalised to other countries.

This paper provides an insight into the decision-making practice of retail buyers in Greek luxury fashion retailers, where the buying task involves balancing the retailer's commercial interests with a more cultural role in terms of shaping fashion trends and generating PR and publicity for the retailer. The task is further complicated by the power imbalance between retailer and brand, enabling brands to impose limitations on the buyer's decision. Additionally, the combined influence of shortening product life cycles, increasing product variety and the emergence of a new and younger luxury fashion consumer requires a shift from intuitive to scientific, data-driven decision making.

THE process of setting up the new Polytechnics initiated by the White Paper of May, 1966 entitled “A Plan for Polytechnics and other Colleges” is now approaching completion. Of the 30 Polytechnics proposed 14 have now been established and practically all the others should be in operation by next September. All of them embrace one or more Colleges of Technology. Colleges of Art, Building and Commerce are also involved and, in two cases, Colleges of Education.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework to distinguish between various types of antecedents and consequences of impulse buying. The authors tested it using a meta-analytical approach.

The authors examined 12 databases and analyzed 178 relationships in 100 articles. For the quantitative data analysis, the authors used the coefficient of correlation r as a metric to measure the effect size of the studied scope variables.

The findings of this meta-analysis demonstrated significant relation of antecedents and consequences of the impulse buying behavior, such as consumer impulsiveness (r = 0.464), materialistic consumption (r = 0.344), purchase pleasure (r = 0.270), hedonic value (r = 0.311), income (r = 0.703), gender (r = 0.150), age (r = −0.062), store atmosphere (r = 0.166), decision-making (r = 0.703) and positive emotions (r = 0.323).

This meta-analysis reviewed relationships found worldwide in the literature, expanding and improving the current knowledge. The meta-analysis identified ways that research on impulse buying is lacking and presented suggestions for the elaboration of new studies to allow future researchers to better define their agendas.

This meta-analysis brings important questions, such as impulse buying behavior is associated not only with consumer impulsiveness but also with materialistic consumption.

This research tested the impact of the antecedents and consequences of impulse buying and presented important results through this meta-analytical review. This meta-analysis contributes to the marketing literature, with a set of empirical generalizations, including relationship coefficients and calculated fail-safe numbers.

This study aims to delineate the phenomenon of stressful eating within generation Z due to the times they are living in and to extract propositions which elucidate phases of stressful eating within Zers.

Based on relevant literature on consumer obesity, theories of pure impulse buying and reasoned action, cognitive constructs eminent for reasoned conditioned behaviour are extracted. Followed by extraction of the reasoned conditioned behaviour and its cognitive constructs within Zers. Thereafter, a conceptual framework is developed with propositions of stressful eating within Zers.

Zers indulge in reasoned conditioned behaviour initially owing to their healthy understanding insights, and the activations of cognitive capacities within them due to the law of effect. The law of effect is cyclical after the first reasoned consumption among Zers, leading to obesity and constricting self-controlling behaviour.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that provides a deep understanding of the cognitive mechanism orienting generation Z’s stressful eating indulgence even though they have higher healthy lifestyle understandings.

This paper aims to study whether age impacts the responses to different communication cues in terms of brand recall, attitude toward advertisement, attitude toward brand and purchase intention, and which age groups respond more favorably to a given cue.

An experimental research was conducted across a sample of 1,050 respondents in Delhi to test variance in consumer attitudes across “tweenagers”, teenagers, youth, young adults and adults, when exposed to different communication cues for dummy brands of biscuits and mobile handsets.

Significant variances were observed in consumer attitudes across the five age groups. However, the variation pattern differs across the two product categories. The caricature cue worked well for biscuits across most age groups. For mobile handsets, the picture cue was very effective for the two younger age groups but not as much for others. The product information cue was highly effective for adults.

The study provides insights on making communication for brands targeted at more than one age group. If adults are a part of the marketers’ age group, some amount of product information is highly desirable, just as bright pictures/caricatures are necessary for tweenagers. For teenagers, who exhibit high variance vis-a-vis other age groups, communication needs to be customized. For brands where both children and adults are part of the target audience, common appeals can easily be identified, as they had similar responses in all but one case.

The framework proposed in this research fills a gap in the existing literature by establishing that age impacts attitude formation in response to communication cues and gives insights for marketing communication.