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The purpose of this study is to investigate the conditions under which small independent retailers can improve their business performance by adopting a merchandising information orientation and strategically integrating into retailer buying groups.

This study tests hypotheses using a hierarchical multiple regression model and data obtained from 241 supermarket retailers that are existing members of buying groups in Japan.

The results indicate that merchandising information orientation alone may not be a beneficial strategy for small independent retailers to improve their business performance; however, by combining a merchandising information strategy with strong strategic integration with a buying group, optimal benefits can be achieved.

The findings highlight the potential benefits small independent retailers can gain from buying groups when pursuing a merchandising information orientation, which may prompt such retailers to actively integrate the policies and activities of the buying group into their business strategy.

The authors conceptualise retailers’ merchandising information in a model that demonstrates the link between a firm’s information strategy and its performance from the perspective of resource-based theory. Thus, this study advances the knowledge of the strategic behaviours of small independent retailers and provides valuable information for buying groups in the retail sector.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Small retailers must overcome various challenges in order to remain competitive. Such operators can improve business performance through strategic integration within an appropriate buying group that permits them to access key additional merchandising information, resources and support.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Drawing on the resource-based view, this study aims to investigate the conditions under which small- and medium-sized retailers can improve competitive benefits through the lens of brand equity and strategies for competitive advantage in retail buying groups.

This study collected 241 samples from small- and medium-sized supermarket retailers who joined retail buying groups in Japan.

This study offers two key findings. First, the results indicate that a buying group’s brand equity partially mediates the relationship between member retailers’ strategic integration and their buying group benefits. Second, member retailers with a stronger differentiation orientation strengthen the positive impact of strategic integration on the buying group’s brand equity and buying group benefits. The moderating effects of low-cost orientation were not found to be significant.

To highlight the sustainable growth of small- and medium-sized retailers in retail buying groups, which are often ignored in the extant literature, this study offers practical guidance on the importance of a buying group’s brand equity. In addition, based on the findings, this paper postulates that member retailers pursuing differentiation orientation, rather than low-cost orientation, are more beneficial to retail buying groups in terms of relational outcomes and performance consequences.

By conceptualizing brand equity in retail buying groups, this study suggests a novel approach for retail management that investigates how a buying group’s brand equity is linked to strategic integration, strategies for competitive advantage and buying group benefits from the viewpoint of member retailers.

The purpose of this study is to examine customer orientation and fashion merchandising competencies to learn which strategic option has a stronger relationship with retailer financial performance.

A cross‐sectional survey was used to collect self‐report data from a random sample of 275 small specialty retailers of women's clothing in Bangkok. Retailers offer similar merchandise assortments and customer services in dense, highly competitive, agglomerative environments. The survey form contained multi‐item scales measuring customer orientation, fashion merchandising competencies, and store financial performance. Bivariate correlations, multiple regression coefficients, and hierarchical linear model coefficients describe relationships of interest, controlling for retailer location.

Results show medium to large effect sizes for several fashion merchandising competencies but no substantive effects for the two customer orientation constructs. Effect sizes depend on whether financial performance is measured subjectively or as retailer return on investment or as probability of retailer survival.

Data are restricted in range and reported effect sizes are smaller than true effect sizes. Data also are influenced by common method variance, influencing reported effect sizes in an opposite direction. Effect sizes may or may not describe causal relationships because of the study's cross‐sectional design. Because of the study's setting in Bangkok, results must be extended to similar retail settings with caution. Results indicate that a clustered fashion retailer can improve financial performance by striving for a fashion leadership position, anticipating fashion trends, and offering merchandise assortments in terms of styles and usages. Results indicate that a clustered fashion retailer will have difficulty improving financial performance via customer service and CRM activities.

Few studies in fashion retailing address predictors of financial performance at the individual store level. The authors help fill this knowledge gap by examining relationships between customer service activities, CRM activities, and key merchandising competencies and retailer subjective financial performance, return on investment, and probability of survival. Retailers compete in a spatially confined area, facilitating comparison shopping and heightening rivalries between retailers.

The purpose of this study is to provide detailed information about the shopping behaviors and brand/product preferences of college students. To accomplish this purpose the following objectives were proposed: to identify college student segments’ underlying clothing shopping orientations; to profile these consumers by demographics and brand/product preferences; and to use apparel expenditures to further characterize the market segments.

A survey of college students at a major university was conducted. After adopting the listwise deletion method, 185 useable questionnaires were available for analysis. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, K‐means cluster analysis, Chi‐square, ANOVA, and Dunnett T3 tests were employed. Results showed that three segments were identified (i.e. apathetic price‐forward shoppers, hedonic fashion‐forward shoppers, involved price‐forward shoppers), and the three hypotheses were supported.

The paper shows that the three segments can be characterized by distinct profiles of demographics and brand/product preferences. Marketing and merchandising strategies for retailers are provided.

Few studies have examined college students’ specific brand/product preferences even though information about these consumer preferences can be directly and practically utilized by apparel retailers for their merchandise planning. There is also a lack of studies that examined college students' clothing behavior based on their major. With the increasing importance of brand as a marketing tool, this information is important to academic researchers and retailers.

This study aims to discern emerging trends and provide a longitudinal perspective on merchandising research by identifying relationships between merchandising-related subdomains/themes.

This study sourced 657 merchandising-related articles published since 1960, from the Scopus database and 425 from Web of Science. After processing and normalizing the data, this study performed co-word and thematic network analyses. Taking a text mining approach, this study used topic modeling to identify a set of coherent topics characterized by the keywords of the articles.

This study identified the following merchandising-related themes: branding, retail, consumer, behavior, modeling, textile and clothing industry and visual merchandising. Although visual merchandising was the first type of merchandising to be used in-store, only recently has it become an emerging topic in the academic literature. There has been a further trend over the past decade to understand the adoption of simulation technology, such as computer-aided design, particularly in supply chain management in the clothing industry. These and other findings contribute to the discussion of the merchandising concept, approached from an evolutionary perspective.

The conclusions of this study hold implications at the intersection of merchandising, sectors, new technologies, research methodologies and merchandising-practitioner education. Research trends suggest that, in the future, virtual reality and augmented reality using neuroscientific methods will be applied to the e-merchandising context.

The different dimensions of merchandising can be used to leverage store managers’ decision-making process toward an integrated store-management strategy. In particular, by adopting loyalty merchandising tactics, the store can generate emotional attachment among consumers, who will perceive its value and services as unique, thanks to merchandising items designed specifically with that aim in mind. The stimulation of unplanned purchases, the strategic location of products and duration of each merchandising activity in the store, the digitalization of merchandising and the application of findings from neuroscience studies are some of the most relevant practical applications.

This study provides the first-ever longitudinal review of the state of the art in merchandising research, taking a holistic perspective of this field of knowledge spanning a 60-year period. The work makes a valuable contribution to the development of the marketing discipline.

Fashion merchandising hold a paramount position within the realm of retail marketing. Currently, the purpose of this article is that the assessment of display effectiveness predominantly relies on the subjective judgment of merchandisers due to the absence of an effective evaluation method. Although eye-tracking devices have found extensive used in tracking the gaze trajectory of subject, they exhibit limitations in terms of stability when applied to the evaluation of various scenes. This underscores the need for a dependable, user-friendly and objective assessment method.

To develop a cost-effective and convenient evaluation method, the authors introduced an image processing framework for the assessment of variations in the impact of store furnishings. An optimized visual saliency methodology that leverages a multiscale pyramid model, incorporating color, brightness and orientation features, to construct a visual saliency heatmap. Additionally, the authors have established two pivotal evaluation indices aimed at quantifying attention coverage and dispersion. Specifically, bottom features are extract from 9 distinct scale images which are down sampled from merchandising photographs. Subsequently, these extracted features are amalgamated to form a heatmap, serving as the focal point of the evaluation process. The authors have proposed evaluation indices dedicated to measuring visual focus and dispersion, facilitating a precise quantification of attention distribution within the observed scenes.

In comparison to conventional saliency algorithm, the optimization method yields more intuitive feedback regarding scene contrast. Moreover, the optimized approach results in a more concentrated focus within the central region of the visual field, a pattern in alignment with physiological research findings. The results affirm that the two defined indicators prove highly effective in discerning variations in visual attention across diverse brand store displays.

The study introduces an intelligent and cost-effective objective evaluate method founded upon visual saliency. This pioneering approach not only effectively discerns the efficacy of merchandising efforts but also holds the potential for extension to the assessment of fashion advertisements, home design and website aesthetics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of market orientation for small manufacturers vying to be suppliers in the mass retail marketplace. It examines the mediating effect of product‐related factors (market readiness and market level) on the market orientation‐performance relationship. The paper also assesses the performance of these manufacturers using measures such as buyer review and actual product acceptance.

This paper uses the results of a program, designed to evaluate and develop small manufacturers for the mass retail marketplace, to test the effect of a market orientation philosophy and product‐related factors on small firm performance.

It is found that while a market orientation is critical for the success of these manufacturers, product‐related factors have an even greater value in assessing their performance. Specifically, an evaluator's assessment of a product's readiness for the marketplace and his/her recommendation for the type of market it should enter were much better at predicting product performance for the small manufacturers taking part in the program.

The paper shows that small firms wanting to supply the mass‐merchandising marketplace should not rely solely on market orientation when trying to compete at this level. Market orientation may improve your market readiness, but it does not predict success for small manufacturers. Instead, low market orientation levels and poor product‐related factors strongly predict failure.

To the authors' knowledge no other articles examine market orientation's effect on small manufacturing performance using specific product‐related measures as a mediating variable.

The principal purpose of this study is to analyze the consumer emotions on virtual merchandising in the context of social consumption ecosystem driven by value and lifestyle across the big middle consumer segment.

The qualitative information has been collected from 114 respondents selected through snowballing technique within the metropolitan area of Mexico City. A semi-structured research instrument was used to conduct the in-depth interviews online.

The results of the study indicate that technology-led virtual merchandising stimulates arousal and merriment among consumers, which converges the self-image congruence and appearance similarity. The subjects of the study have endorsed that visual stimulus leading to self-image and body image congruence develop consistent arousal and merriment, which lead to positive purchase intentions and buying decisions and inculcate the perception as seeing is experiencing.

The samples drawn for this study may also limit the possibilities of generalization of the study results and map the consumer behavior in a predetermined pattern.

This study is founded on the theoretical maxims of theory of visual perceptions, cognitive theory of reasoning, theory of appearance and reality and Heider’s balance theory and contributes to these theories by explaining the relationship between the social self-concept and self-image congruence.

Firms retailing online fashion apparel should also be engaged in developing user-generated contents through communications on social media encouraging experiential videos, slogans and reviews.

This paper significantly contributes to theoretical and practical implications on virtual shopping, emotions and beliefs and consumption culture.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a concept‐response segmentation used to identify different customer “mind‐sets”. Based on this segmentation, in a merchandising situation, one can interact with the customer to identify the segment to which the customer belongs and in turn offer the proper product and merchandising.

The study deals with the creation of new hair products, using both ideation by brand Delphi™ and by experimental design of ideas with conjoint measurement (IdeaMap.Net). It ends with the creation of a merchandising product for hair coloring based on concept segmentation. First the internet was used to facilitate the acquisition and prioritization of new ideas. Then the experimental design of ideas was used to identify which perform well in the body of test concepts.

Three segments were identified: Segment 1 (54 percent) wants easy to use, high technology, and reliable products. Segment 2 (25 percent) wants to give, and get information about themselves, with respect to hair coloring. Furthermore, they want to make information giving/getting a process, not simply a rapid 1‐2‐3 affair. Segment 3 (21 percent) wants results. They want information, primarily what the product will do for them, what it delivers.

The innovative research deals with the creation of “new to the world” product ideas and the segmentation of respondents into different groups, based on their mind‐sets.

The segmentation results provide the manufacturer and the trade with an opportunity to fine‐tune the development of the new product and its merchandising. One of the recurring questions, however, is how to find these segments in the population? Data mining works by searching for assignment rules that put people into the segments based on a decision rule. The variables used by the decision rule come from external information about the respondent, which the respondent may have provided previously, or patterns of purchases that the individual may have made over time. The objective is to increase the chances of correctly classifying a new individual as a member of one of the three segments, and by so doing present the prospect with a better offer, whether an improved product or shopping experience.

The study deals with the creation of new hair products, using both ideation by brand Delphi™ and by experimental design of ideas with conjoint measurement (IdeaMap.Net). This is a discussion towards high tech in merchandising haircoloring products. It examines new opportunities for development.