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The study aims to explore how concept stores (theoretically) differ from other experience-based retail formats, and hence, how they (practically) contribute to a diversified retail store portfolio.

Case study based on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with seven IKEA retail managers, three industry experts and 26 customers of IKEA concept stores in London and Stockholm.

The concept store represents a conceptual departure from other experiential store formats. It is neither fully experiential in the sense that it is not only about marketing communications nor is it sales or profit-focused. Its aim is to be an accessible touchpoint that reduces friction on a diversified customer journey with its value to the retail portfolio being that it attracts new and latent customers, mitigates existing inhibiting factors and drives them to other touchpoints.

Ideas about the different characteristics of new store formats and their potential to shape the customer experience are extended. New formats reflect innovation in retailing and are part of a retail portfolio which generates different customer expectations and determinants from traditional store formats which provide the customers' existing reference point.

The contributions of new formats should be evaluated in light of other existing formats in the portfolio and not isolated. This is particularly true when considering format cannibalisation and the potentially extended customer journey that arises when customers use traditional format stores and new concept format stores simultaneously.

Previous research, using sales metrics and market-based results as performance determinants, suggests negative outcomes for format diversification. Our study suggests that the contributions of the concept store format should be viewed from an overall customer journey perspective and the “performance” of different format based touchpoints are not best captured through traditional sales evaluation methods.

Although previous research has examined the role of franchising for the economic development of countries, no empirical study to date has investigated the importance of franchising for social, infrastructural, and institutional development. The authors address this research gap by applying research results from the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and highlight that franchising has a positive impact on economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development.

This study uses a fixed-effects model on a panel dataset for 2006–2015 from 49 countries to test the hypothesis that franchising positively influences various dimensions of country development such as economic social institutional and infrastructural development.

The findings highlight that franchising has a positive impact on the economic, social, infrastructural, and institutional development of a country. Specifically, the results show that the earlier and the more franchising systems enter a country, the stronger the positive impact of franchising on the country's economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development.

This study has several limitations that provide directions for further research. First, the empirical investigation is limited by the characteristics of the data, which are composed of information from 49 countries (covering a period of 10 years). Because franchising is not recognized as a form of entrepreneurial governance in many emerging and developing countries, the available information is mainly provided by the franchise associations in the various countries. Hence, there is a need to collect additional data in each country and to include additional countries. Second, although the authors included developed and developing countries in the analysis, the authors could not differentiate between developed and developing countries when testing the hypotheses, because the database was not sufficiently complete. Third, future studies should analyze the causality issue between franchising and development more closely. The role of franchising in development may be changing depending on different unobserved country factors, economic sector characteristics, or development stages.

What are the practical implications of this study for the role of franchising in the development of emerging and developing economies? Because public policy in emerging and developing countries suffers from a lack of financial resources to improve the social, infrastructural and institutional environment, entrepreneurs, such as franchisors who expand into these countries, play an important role for these countries' development. In addition to their entrepreneurial role of exploring and exploiting profit opportunities, they are social, institutional, and political entrepreneurs who may positively influence country development (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Shepard and Patzelt, 2011). Specifically, the findings highlight that countries with an older franchise sector (more years of franchise experience) may realize first-mover advantages and hence larger positive spillover effects on their economic, social, institutional and infrastructural development than countries with a younger franchise sector. Hence, governments of emerging and developing countries have the opportunity and responsibility to reduce potential market entry barriers and provide additional incentives for franchise systems in order to trigger these positive spillover effects. The authors expect that the spillover effects from the franchise sector on the economic, institutional, social and infrastructural development of a country are stronger in emerging and developing countries than in developed countries.

Previous research has focused on the impact of franchising on the economic development of a country, such as its growth of gross domestic product (GDP), employment, business skills, innovation and technology transfer. This study extends the existing literature by going beyond the impact of franchising on economic development: the results show that franchising as an entrepreneurial activity offers opportunities for economic, social, institutional, and infrastructural development, all of which are particularly important for emerging and developing economies. The findings of this study contribute to the international franchise and development economics literature by offering a better understanding of the impact of franchising on country development.

The study develops a decision support system for the spatial distribution of store flyers, identifying a number of factors related to the demand and the competition influencing the complexities of their allocation to the target population.

The model was developed incorporating the insights found in existing marketing literature and bypassing the limitations of the managerial practices. To this end, an in-depth discussion with a panel of retailers was held. The model was tested in collaboration with a retail chain.

The proposed system is flexible and provides an almost endless array of solutions in accordance with the retailer's strategic approach to the market. It captures the key trade-offs that need to be made during the decision-making process of a retailer with limited marketing resources.

The traditional managerial approach, based on a set of operational steps, is overtaken by a model that systematically considers the interrelationships between the decision-making factors involved.

This is the first attempt to analyse spatial distribution of store flyers, a topic that has yet to be explored in retail marketing research. The paper conceptualises the key variables which affect the optimisation problem and reviews the different streams of extant research to obtain the appropriate insights.

Regarding the retail internal supply chain (SC), both retailers and research are currently focused on reactive food waste reduction options in stores (e.g. discounting or donations). These options reduce waste after a surplus has emerged but do not prevent an emerging surplus in the first place. This paper aims to reveal how retailers can proactively prevent waste along the SC and why the options identified are impactful but, at the same time, often complex to implement.

The authors follow an exploratory approach for a nascent topic to obtain insights into measures taken in practice. Interviews with experts from retail build the main data source.

The authors identify and analyze 21 inbound, warehousing, distribution and store-related options applied in grocery retail. Despite the expected high overall impact on waste, prevention measures in inbound logistics and distribution and warehousing have not been intensively applied to date.

The authors provide a structured approach to mitigate waste within retailers' operations and categorize the types of barriers that need to be addressed.

This research provides a better understanding of prevention options in retail operations, which has not yet been empirically explored. Furthermore, this study conceptualizes prevention and reduction options and reveals implementation patterns.