Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of parent brand characteristics and brand-extension fit on attitude towards the extension in the context of services-to-goods (SG) brand extension compared with services-to-services (SS) brand extension.

A survey design was used to collect data from 626 individual respondents. The respondents were selected using probability sampling from two cities in India. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The study indicated that context (SS or SG) moderated the influence of factors on attitude toward brand extension. A favorable attitude towards the parent brand had a greater positive influence on SS brand extension compared with SG brand extension. Quality variance among service types under the parent brand had a higher negative impact on attitude towards SG brand extension than on attitude towards SS brand extension.

Managers may prefer extending a service brand to another service rather than a good when consumers have a favorable attitude towards the brand. Furthermore, when the perceived quality of service types under a service brand varies substantially, extension of the brand to a good requires greater concern than extension to a service.

The unique contribution of this study is the examination of the moderating influence of the characteristics of an offering (SS vis-à-vis SG) on the link between brand extension attitude and its influencing factors.

The study seeks to understand the influences on the prevalence of rural retailing institution of periodic markets. It examines the influence of access to and population of the location on the performance of periodic markets and their effect on the competition between periodic markets and local rural retail stores.

Simultaneous cross-sectional study on census data is used to understand changes in performance of periodic markets in the context of growth in retail stores.

The superior performance of local retail shop compared to outshopping in periodic markets is contrary to observation in literature developed in the context of urban outshopping.

Retail chains need to develop a separate program for location of outlets that serve rural areas as access influences retail performance. In rural areas marketers can use traditional periodic markets in addition to conventional retail store given the limited inter-format retail competition.

This is one of the few studies to explicitly examine periodic markets as a retail format. Outshopping is studied in the context of growth in local retail stores unlike earlier studies in the urban context where the local stores exhibit reduced sales.

Purpose – This study aims to examine empirically how consumers' attitude towards retail stores gets affected by situational, consumer, store and product characteristic variables when they face out‐of‐stock situations. Design/methodology/approach – Survey method for data collection was used. Data were collected from a sample of 1,207 retail customers in India's unorganized retail sector across five product categories in Varanasi, India. Findings – Results showed that six of the independent variables considered, namely, shopping attitude of respondent, store loyalty (SL), perceived store prices, store distance, shopping frequency, and brand loyalty (in order of importance of impact) significantly influenced consumers' attitude towards retail store in out‐of‐stock. Research limitations/implications – Data were collected only for five product categories and for unorganized retail setting because of which results and findings are not generalizeable to beyond these boundaries. Practical implications – Implications of this for retailers and future research are discussed. Originality/value – Since attitudes towards retail outlets are very important in determining future SL and subsequent profitability, understanding of consumer store attitudes in negative events like stockout is importantly for retailers. The paper provides crucial insights to retailers by identifying independent variables that must be considered while designing their operations.

Dinesh Sibal, CEO of Q-Connect, was reading his mails on his laptop after returning back to his hotel room in Guwahati. He was in Guwahati for his regular monthly meeting with field team. One of the mails was from marketing manager of a leading consumer durables company dealing in kitchen utensils and appliances. The company wanted to use Q-Connect network to carry out demonstrations and sales of its products for its target customers in Assam. Sibal was pleased as this was the first instance of a company reaching out to him for using Q-Connect network. He wanted to share the good news with his colleague Gulancha Baruah with whom he had built this network.