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The customer retail experience is frequently interrupted by disturbances such as ringing phones and other people. Employees must be able to respond to retail disturbances effectively to ensure that customers have a satisfactory experience in the retailer. Using Affective Events Theory as a framework, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model for understanding how retail disturbances affect customers outcomes and how retail employee response mitigates the negative impact of retail disturbances.

The model was tested using a pre-study of retail managers and consumers, a survey study and four experimental studies.

Retail disturbances reduce interactional justice and customer positive emotions. Customers pay attention to how employees address retail disturbances, even when they are not directly involved.

The research experiments focus on sound-based disturbances. Other stimuli (e.g. olfactory or visual) should be examined in more detail.

Employees can mitigate the negative effects of retail disturbances on customers with a positive response to the disturbance and to customers. Employee responses influence customers currently receiving service and nearby shoppers.

The findings demonstrate the deleterious effect of solicitation calls on small retailers and provide recommendations for reducing solicitation calls.

This research shows that retail disturbances reduce customer outcomes, employee response becomes part of the disturbance event, and that it is possible for employees to address a group of nearby customers indirectly through unintentional observation.

Given increasing customer expectations and disturbances to product returns management, capabilities such as supply chain resilience (SCR) can complement service recovery strategies in retail supply chains. This study utilizes procedural justice theory (PJT) to conceptualize service recovery resilience as a capability that allows firms to meet customer requirements when dealing with disruptions, and empirically investigates its impact on procedural and interactional justice and customer outcomes (i.e. satisfaction and loyalty) in the context of product replacement.

This research employs two scenario-based experiments using a sample of 368 customers to explore the outcomes associated with service recovery resilience.

The investigation shows more satisfied and loyal customers when a retail supply chain can overcome service recovery challenges through SCR. The study shows that customers evaluate not only the process itself, but also their interactions with the retailer. Specifically, procedural justice and interactional justice have a significant influence on these relationships.

This study proposes service recovery resilience as a concept that bridges service recovery theory with supply chain strategy in the unique context of product replacement. Further, this study also notes how information enhances customer satisfaction with the retailer's effort to address disturbances in the recovery process. Finally, this study informs managers on the capabilities needed to face new customers' needs.

Explains the Wheel of Retailing as an attempt to explain the dynamics of change and evolution at the social level. Suggests that the theory of new retail institutions beginning with low levels of prices and services and then upgrading is not always proved to be so. Concludes that retailing is a social process with the development of institutions determined by the society in which they exist and not by a deterministic pattern of development.

Three basic approaches to retail institutional change can be discerned in the last 30 years. The first contends that institutional evolution is a function of developments in the socio‐economic environment. The second argues that change occurs in a cyclical fashion. The third considers inter‐institutional conflict to be the mainspring of retail change. None of those approaches is found to be entirely satisfactory, and a series of combination theories has been posited. It is argued that regional institutional change is the result of environmental forces and a cycle‐like sequence of inter‐institutional conflict.

Design is an important construct in the retail environment literature. Yet, the measures used for design have not followed appropriate scale development procedures. The purpose of this study is to provide a conceptual definition and then develop a scale for retail environment design (RED).

Interviews with both consumers and marketing researchers are used to generate a potential list of items. Using four different studies, these items are refined, and the RED scale is offered.

This study develops and validates the four-dimensional RED scale to measure the design of retail environments. The dimensions are functional, aesthetic, lighting and signage.

The newly developed RED scale will allow retailing researchers to measure lighting and signage qualities as part of retail design, measure design of retail environments more accurately and allow different studies to be compared.

The newly developed RED scale will allow retailers to better understand customers’ perceptions of the four dimensions of design. Retailers spend significant time and money designing and redesigning retail environments. The RED scale will enable managers to ensure these significant investments create competitive advantages and an appropriate return on investment.

A scale to measure retail environment design is developed. The scale includes two dimensions (lighting and signage) that are not typically investigated.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a taxonomy to describe and synthesize the retail strategies and store formats in the fast-changing modernization context of emerging markets. It identifies how these different formats are related to the existing literature about retail evolution. The paper proposes analogies between the empirical findings and the Big Middle Theory model developed by Levy et al. (2005).

Structured observations and personal interviews were conducted with managers/owners of 108 apparel stores located in three unplanned shopping districts in São Paulo, Brazil. Cluster analysis was used to derive the store formats.

The results identify four store formats – old fashioned, price focused, specialized, and consolidated – reflecting diverse marketing strategies and different stages in the retailing modernization cycle. There is a striking resemblance between these empirically derived formats and the four types of retail segments (Big Middle, Low price, Innovative, and in Trouble) proposed by the Big Middle model.

There are limitations due to the exploratory nature of the research: the specific context (São Paulo, apparel retail sector) where the empirical data was collected restricts the generalization of the results to other situations; lack of precision in the appraisal of the variables might limit the research replicability. Nevertheless, this research contributes to expanding the scarce knowledge about the retailing phenomenon in emerging markets. An extension of the Big Middle model is suggested to depict the existing retail formats in emerging markets, offering therefore a theoretical contribution to the retail literature.

The study provides retailers with a framework against which to map their format, competitive strategy, and stages of the modernization cycle, enabling them to better adjust the configuration of their marketing mix variables. It also offers a classification scheme of stores formats which will help to describe the apparel retailing industry in emerging markets.

Public policies are suggested to technically assist the modernization process and survival of more vulnerable retail formats.

Considering the fast-growing economic importance of the new “low-middle class” of emerging markets, and also the relevance of apparel retailing, this research is relevant and unique because it helps to bridge a gap in the limited literature and knowledge in this area.

Prior research does not provide a clear picture of how managers can effectively manage customer in-role and extra-role behaviours in a retail setting. This study aims to test the differential impact of the two main customer relationship predictor paths – identity-based and satisfaction-based paths – on customer in-role and extra-role behaviours.

A random sample of 500 customers from the flagship store of an up-market, international department store chain participated in a written survey. Purchase spending data for each customer was obtained from the retailer’s loyalty card database.

The two studied predictor paths possess a differential impact on customer extra-role behaviours. Civic virtue and co-creation behaviours are exclusively driven by the identity-based path, whereas sportsmanship is driven solely by the satisfaction-based path. Moreover, the identity-based path impacts purchase behaviour only when symbolic purchase motivation is high. Overall satisfaction has no impact on purchase behaviour.

In some retailing contexts, extra-role behaviours such as co-creation or civic virtue might simply be irrelevant (e.g. discount chains).

Managers, who have the intention to stimulate customers to give constructive feedback on products or services, or to involve them in co-creation activities, are well advised to also invest in identity-based path activities.

This study is the first to empirically test the effects of customer identification and overall customer satisfaction on the various dimensions of customer in-role and extra-role behaviours. Customer extra-role behaviours should not be conceptualised as one global construct but should comprise distinct dimensions of discretionary behaviours that have different antecedents.

Lawler (2001) posits that social exchanges create a sense of shared responsibility for outcome success. The purpose of this study is to apply this framework to the vendor/frontline employee/customer triad to examine the underlying role of emotions in how frontline employees’ evaluations of vendors and customers trigger and temper brand advocacy efforts, respectively.

With cross-sectional data from 168 frontline employees working at a leading national retailer of electronic goods, path analysis is used to evaluate the hypotheses.

Frontline employees’ relationship quality with the vendor and perceptions of vendors’ product quality positively influence brand advocacy. Also, customers’ brand affinity and recommendation preference both demonstrate a significant, negative curvilinear relationship with brand advocacy.

Frontline employees’ emotion-laden evaluations of vendors and customer influence brand advocacy in different ways. Vendor relationship quality and brand quality perceptions “trigger” brand advocacy. However, customer’s affinity toward a vendor’s brand and willingness to seek recommendations “temper” brand advocacy. Specifically, brand advocacy effort is low when customers possess very low and very high affinity toward a focal brand – moderate affinity spurs high advocacy; likewise, advocacy is low when customers demonstrate very low and very high interest in seeking the frontline employees’ opinion – moderate interest spurs high advocacy. Although ideal to examine vendor and customer emotional exchanges, using only frontline employee data from a technology-selling retailer may constrain generalizability.

Frontline employee training programs should emphasize the customer’s role in the transaction to increase perceptions of shared responsibility, as a means to create a favorable emotional experience, and accentuate timing strategies on when to pursue heightened or diminished emotionally charged brand advocacy efforts.

This study contributes to the frontline employee behavior literature by viewing shared responsibility in transactions as a source of emotional value, explaining variance in frontline employee brand advocacy through relationship and product quality dimensions, and uncovering curvilinear effects for customers’ brand affinity and recommendation preference in elucidating brand advocacy.

Marketers often select unique color names for products to heighten shopper interest. The purpose of this study is to use self-referencing as the foundation for assessing how a product color name that involves the self impacts product evaluation. This paper also investigates the salient element that might moderate consumers’ responses, in particular for product categories where color serves mainly as decoration and is of secondary importance.

Two between-subjects experiments examined how self-referencing mediates the influence of generic versus identity color names on product evaluation (Study 1) and also tested whether the effect of naming product colors in identity terms is limited to the scenario where cognitive load is low rather than high (Study 2).

The results of this study show that identity color names are more persuasive than generic color names. Self-referencing mediates the results, and the favorable effect of identity color names is diminished in the case of high cognitive load. Such evidence suggests that consumers might face impediments for self-referenced processing when factors exhaust their cognitive resources. The decreased elaboration results in less favorable evaluation.

This research enriches knowledge of how an element as modest as a creative product color name influences consumer evaluation, with suggestions for approaches to color naming.