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The area of salesman behaviour is characterized by a lack of theoretical and empirical research contrasting with the need for an understanding of salesman behaviour in the area of several sales management problems. For instance, when designing a new compensation scheme, a sales manager needs to know what to change, with what probable effect on sales, on salesmen's earnings and, consequently, on net profits. It has been shown that the compensation plan structure should be largely dependent on salesman behaviour patterns. In the same way, knowledge about salesman behaviour has managerial implications for recruiting salesmen displaying desirable behavioural patterns, whenever possible.

SPEAKING at a meeting of the Engineering Industry Marketing Group of the Institute of Marketing recently, Sir Montague Finniston, FRS, FMS, made an attack on the future plans of the British Steel Corporation. He maintained that to make substantial cuts in the Corporation's steelmaking capacity was “absurd”.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the contribution of visitor demand to the seasonal sales variations experienced at grocery retailers in Cornwall, South West England.

Working collaboratively with a major UK retailer provides access to store trading information and customer data from a popular loyalty card scheme. The authors use spatial analysis to identify revenue originating from outside the store catchment, and explore the spatial and temporal nature of the visitor demand recorded in‐store.

The paper demonstrates the significant degree of seasonality experienced around stores in terms of their revenue generated from out‐of‐catchment visitors, and highlights implications for store location planning. Most notably, visitor expenditure tends to demonstrate far more spatial and temporal clustering than residential demand. The authors argue that it is essential for retailers to ensure that their location planning makes full use of all available consumer data to understand the local nature of demand, including the impact of visitor expenditure.

The authors aim to use this insight to develop a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for use within site location planning in the retail sector. This would incorporate a spatial interaction model to estimate and account for variation in local demand generated by seasonal tourist visits.

Customer level loyalty card data are rarely available for academic investigations and the authors are able to provide a unique insight into customer expenditure in tourist locations. There has been little exploration of seasonal tourist demand in store location planning, and this study addresses an identified academic and commercial need.

Little research on the influence of external factors, such as weather and holiday periods, on retail sales on alcoholic beverages is available. This study aims to investigate how weekly retail sales of different alcoholic beverages vary in association with daily maximum temperatures and annual federal holidays across selected US counties in the years 2013 to 2015. The research provides information, which can contribute to better sales forecasts.

Secondary data of weekly retail sales (volume) of alcoholic beverages from 37,346 stores in 651 counties in the USA are analysed. The data cover on average 21% of all existing US counties and 12% of the total US off-trade retail sales of alcoholic beverages in the period studied (Euromonitor, 2017). Additional data of federal holidays and meteorological data are collated for each county in the sample. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average models with exogenous regressors (SARIMAX) are applied to develop forecasting models and to investigate possible relationships and effects.

The results indicate that off-trade retail sales of beer, liquor, red and white wine are temperature sensitive throughout the year, while contrary to expectations rosé, sparkling and other wines are not. Sales sensitivities to temperature also differ by geography. In the warmest regions, liquor and white wine sales do not respond to temperature changes, as opposed to the coolest regions, where they are responsive. Public holidays, particularly Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year holidays, represent a constant influencing factor on short-term sales increases for all investigated alcoholic beverage categories.

This is the first large-scale study of weather and holiday-related sales variations over time, across geographies and different alcoholic beverage categories. Seasonal and non-seasonal short-term sales variations are important for retailers and manufacturers alike. Accounting for expected changes in demand accommodates efficiencies along the supply chain and has implications for retail management, as well as adjusting marketing efforts in competing categories.

This paper aims to find out what characterises salespeople in the most effective salesforce in Spain.

An empirical analysis has been done with 108 field sales managers from different sectors of activity to determine the conditions of the salesperson's control, professionalism and behaviour that affect his/her performance and the effectiveness of companies. A structural equations model or second generation multivariate model was used – PLS.

The results show that more effective salesforces are controlled through behaviour control systems, salespersons in this team identify with the company's strategic objectives and an important part of their remuneration is based on a fixed salary.

First, the information has been gathered on a unique hierarchical level – team managers. Second, the company's activity sector and the type of salesperson can modify the results. Finally, the size of the sample has limited the potential application of specific statistical techniques and even the generalisation of the results.

Field sales managers must help to define the salespeople's tasks to reach the company's objectives in the most effective way. This situation implies, logically, that control is exerted over behaviour and to a lesser extent over the results achieved by the salesperson.

The paper determines those variables which allow companies, and especially those persons holding responsibility in the salesforce, to increase their effectiveness. The objective enriches the knowledge on sales effectiveness and also applies, in the Spanish case, a study methodology that has been applied in other countries.

Often, real estate factors are given much of the credit for a particular site’s success or failure when it comes to sales. The current paper asserts that some of the praise or blame heaped onto real estate decision‐makers may be undue. Sometimes success or failure is due to non‐real estate factors such as a marketing or advertising strategy, operations, or brand awareness. The paper discusses non‐real estate variables that contribute to a site’s overall success or failure, and offers diagnostics and suggestions to help address non‐real estate problems that could influence sales.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of wholesale price discrimination by a manufacturer in a retailer–e-tailer dual-channel supply chain for different product categories based on their online channel preference.

This paper considers a dual-channel supply chain comprising of a retailer and an e-tailer engaged in competition. Game-theoretic models are developed to model the competition between the retailer and e-tailer and to derive their optimal price, optimal order quantity and optimal profit under (1) equal wholesale price strategy and (2) discriminatory wholesale price strategy. Further, a numerical example was employed to quantify the results and to capture the variation with respect to online channel preference of the product.

It is beneficial for the manufacturer to adopt a discriminatory wholesale price strategy for products having both high online channel preference and low online channel preference. However, equal wholesale price strategy is beneficial for the e-tailer and the retailer in the case of products having high online channel preference and in the case of products having low online channel preference, respectively.

The study helps the manufacturers to maximize their profit by adopting the right wholesale price strategy considering the online channel preference of the product when the manufacturers are supplying to heterogeneous retailers.

There is scant literature on the wholesale price strategy of the manufacturer considering the heterogeneous downstream retailers. This paper contributes the literature by bridging this gap. In addition, the study establishes a link between the wholesale price strategy and online channel preference of the product.

In order to predict the future we must examine the past in order to observe trends over periods of time and establish the degree of probability with which these trends are likely to repeat themselves in the future. All forecasts are wrong, and management must be aware of this fact and decide upon the degree of inexactitude that can be tolerated when planning for the future.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the theory and practice of supply chain management in terms of how an organisation should structure its supply base to be resilient to supply uncertainties and disruptions. An empirical assessment of supplier response diversity is demonstrated, and the following research question posed: Is response diversity of suppliers positively associated with supply chain resilience, more positively than mere supplier diversity is?

Resilience is operationalised as the maintenance of sales of two food products in 27 southern Finnish retail stores during two distinct disruptions. Response diversity is operationalised as 1) diversity in the personnel sizes of slaughterhouse suppliers of pork under domestic strikes and as 2) evenness in the proportions of imports and domestic supply of food oil under global price volatility. A five-step quantitative assessment is performed.

Response diversity is positively related to the maintenance of sales, more positively than diversity of individual suppliers is.

Response diversity is an advancement to the theory of supply chain resilience and supply base management, and access to big data increases practical potential.

Empirical assessments of response diversity of suppliers provide buyer companies an effective means to enhance their supply base management for resilience.

The proposed approach is useful for teaching and for authorities to enhance food security.

This first assessment of response diversity of supply chain operations presents an important advancement in the theory and practice of supply base management for resilience.

The log‐normal distribution provides a powerful decision tool for assessing the impact of marketing policies upon inventory allocations.