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1 – 10 of over 20000Relatively little research explicitly considers how a firmās channel decisions affect consumer tradeoffs between the cognitive costs of online search and the physical costs of…
Abstract
Purpose
Relatively little research explicitly considers how a firmās channel decisions affect consumer tradeoffs between the cognitive costs of online search and the physical costs of visiting a retail store. This study aims to argue that opening a new retail store affects both cognitive and physical search costs, but that the magnitude of these effects depends on the location of the consumer relative to the new store. In addition, individual differences in consumersā cognitive costs that should moderate these effects.
Design/methodology/approach
This study takes the opening of multiple retailer stores on the same day as the nature experiment. Combining with data from other sources, this study tests the hypotheses using conditional logit for the correction of incidental problem in the traditional fix-effect logit model. Endogeneity issue is tested with the control function approach.
Findings
This study finds that opening a new store leads to a 136% increase in the odds of online visiting by consumers who live in the broader metropolitan area of the new store, while it leads to a 43% decrease in the odds of online visiting by consumers who live in the nearby shopping region. However, the effect of store entry on increasing website search is weaker for consumers who are more loyal, and the effect of store entry on decreasing website search is weaker for consumers who are more efficient in searching online.
Originality/value
This study adds to prior research by identifying when, and for which consumers, opening a physical store has complimentary versus substitutive effects on online search behavior.
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Christopher M. Moore, Anne Marie Doherty and Stephen A. Doyle
Employing the qualitative method, this paper sets out to investigate the role and function of flagship stores as a market entry mechanism employed by luxury fashion retailers.
Abstract
Purpose
Employing the qualitative method, this paper sets out to investigate the role and function of flagship stores as a market entry mechanism employed by luxury fashion retailers.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employs an interpretive research position, utilising qualitative techniques in the form of semiāstructured interviews with Ć©lite informants. In total, 12 luxury fashion retailers form the empirical focus of the work.
Findings
The paper identifies the defining characteristics of luxury retailers' flagship stores. It finds that luxury flagship stores represent a strategic approach to market entry that is employed to support, enhance and develop distribution activities within a foreign market. The interdependence of flagship stores and the wholesaling method of distribution is highlighted. The importance of the flagship store in reinforcing and enhancing the retailer's luxury status and enhancing and maintaining relationships not only with customers but also with distribution partners and the fashion media is found to be significant.
Practical implications
The paper provides practical information to luxury retailers on the role and importance of flagship stores as a method of entering international markets.
Originality/value
Flagship stores are a pivotal aspect of any luxury fashion retailer's internationalisation strategy. For the first time in the literature, the paper provides insights into their form and function and an understanding of why they are crucial to the international development of luxury retailers despite their prohibitively high cost.
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Erhard Lick, Angela Bargenda and Dhoha Trabelsi
The article seeks to enrich the body of research on store atmospherics by identifying how storefront window design impacts store entry decisions. An innovative multimodal design…
Abstract
Purpose
The article seeks to enrich the body of research on store atmospherics by identifying how storefront window design impacts store entry decisions. An innovative multimodal design approach is presented, considering both visual and verbal constituents.
Design/methodology/approach
Study 1 draws on a corpus of high-end storefront windows to create a categorization regarding different levels of verbo-visual complexity. The survey in Study 2 (nĀ =Ā 234) serves two purposes: first, to confirm these levels of complexity and second, to investigate the relation between the complexity of window design and store entry decisions.
Findings
Study 2 confirms the order of complexity established in Study 1. The results reveal an inverted-U relationship between window complexity and store entry propensity. Windows of medium level of complexity produce shoppers' relatively highest store entry propensity.
Practical implications
The findings suggest that retailers would benefit from adopting verbo-visual window designs of medium complexity, as this combination optimizes the likeliness of consumers to enter stores.
Originality/value
Research on store atmospherics has until recently primarily focused on in-store cues. Studies on store windows remain vastly underrepresented in extant scholarship. The article not only fills this gap but also incorporates an original interdisciplinary angle on multimodality, which offers new methodological perspectives for research in retail and distribution scholarship.
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The paper aims to investigate the new market entry strategy of the international grocery retailers Aldi SĆ¼d and Costco in China; analyzing if and how their prior-online market…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to investigate the new market entry strategy of the international grocery retailers Aldi SĆ¼d and Costco in China; analyzing if and how their prior-online market entry reflects a strategic response to organizational challenges in the Chinese market, which is a pioneer in the use of digital technologies and the provision of digital services.
Design/methodology/approach
The article identifies major challenges faced by international grocery retailers in China and discusses these with the help of the conceptual approach of embeddedness. The paper is based on expert interviews with senior executives of the two international retailers and other retail specialists and consultants.
Findings
The prior-online market entry by Aldi SĆ¼d and Costco represents a strategic response to organizational challenges that have to be faced in an increasingly challenging and highly digitalized Chinese market. Prior-online market entry allows the two retailers to experiment with the unique and heterogeneous Chinese market and build network and territorial embeddedness to facilitate the establishment of the physical store network. Both retailers utilize online stores to build relation and network with suppliers and customers and to understand Chinese consumer preferences. Yet, the localization strategy of Aldi SĆ¼d and Costco vary greatly.
Originality/value
Grocery retailers' prior-online expansion strategy has not yet been the focus of academic research. In regard to global grocery retailers, such as Aldi SĆ¼d and Costco, previous research argued that they were prepared to accept a lower expansion speed in order to expand at minimum risk and cost and mainly in countries which are regarded as having higher cultural proximity. The paper reveals the potential of the prior-online market entry strategy to change the internationalization behavior of grocery retailers. In addition, it contributes to the understanding of the evolution of market entry strategy into advanced digital economies in the coming new decade.
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Huifeng Bai, Julie McColl and Christopher Moore
The purpose of this paper is to examine internationalising luxury fashion retailersā entry and post-entry expansion strategies in mainland China.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine internationalising luxury fashion retailersā entry and post-entry expansion strategies in mainland China.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts a pragmatic mixed-methods research approach, including a quantitative mail survey and qualitative face-to-face in-depth executive interviews.
Findings
Different from initial single entry methods, multiple methods are increasingly popular for luxury fashion retailersā post-entry expansion in mainland China. Although directly controlled expansion strategies have become significant, local partnerships are still important and omnichannel distribution strategies are rapidly growing.
Research limitations/implications
The findings were generated in mainland China only.
Originality/value
This work provides an understanding of luxury fashion retailersā activities in the Chinese market from both macro and micro perspectives. It examines luxury fashion retailersā initial entry strategies, as well as their post-entry expansion strategies in mainland China. Few studies in the area of international luxury fashion retailing have employed a mixed-methods approach with this number of participants.
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Shashi Kant Ratnakar, Utpal Kiran and Deepak Sharma
Structural topology optimization is computationally expensive due to the involvement of high-resolution mesh and repetitive use of finite element analysis (FEA) for computing the…
Abstract
Purpose
Structural topology optimization is computationally expensive due to the involvement of high-resolution mesh and repetitive use of finite element analysis (FEA) for computing the structural response. Since FEA consumes most of the computational time in each optimization iteration, a novel GPU-based parallel strategy for FEA is presented and applied to the large-scale structural topology optimization of 3D continuum structures.
Design/methodology/approach
A matrix-free solver based on preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method is proposed to minimize the computational time associated with solution of linear system of equations in FEA. The proposed solver uses an innovative strategy to utilize only symmetric half of elemental stiffness matrices for implementation of the element-by-element matrix-free solver on GPU.
Findings
Using solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) method, the proposed matrix-free solver is tested over three 3D structural optimization problems that are discretized using all hexahedral structured and unstructured meshes. Results show that the proposed strategy demonstrates 3.1Ć ā3.3Ć speedup for the FEA solver stage andĀ overall speedup of 2.9Ć ā3.3Ć over the standard element-by-element strategy on the GPU. Moreover, the proposed strategy requires almost 1.8Ć less GPU memory than the standard element-by-element strategy.
Originality/value
The proposed GPU-based matrix-free element-by-element solver takes a more general approach to the symmetry concept than previous works. It stores only symmetric half of the elemental matrices in memory and performs matrix-free sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) without any inter-thread communication. A customized data storage format is also proposed to store and access only symmetric half of elemental stiffness matrices for coalesced read and write operations on GPU over the unstructured mesh.
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Most automated library systems include a transaction logging component. Yet this fact may be among the best kept secrets in the automated library arena. Often only a few people…
Abstract
Most automated library systems include a transaction logging component. Yet this fact may be among the best kept secrets in the automated library arena. Often only a few people within a library are aware of its existence, and even fewer have access to the transaction log data. This is unfortunate, since the concrete data garnered by transaction logs can provide bibliographic instructors, reference staff members, systems librarians, and system designers with unique and valuable insights into the patron/system interaction.
Ram Herstein and Eugene D. Jaffe
Store brands, which were once only found on the shelves of developed countries, are now being introduced in emerging markets in increasing amounts. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
Store brands, which were once only found on the shelves of developed countries, are now being introduced in emerging markets in increasing amounts. The purpose of this paper is to describe the store brand process as it is found in emerging markets. In doing so, the authors explain what are the forces that have led to the development of store brands in emerging markets and the sort of strategies that should be implemented.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provides comparative statistics showing the penetration of store brands in both developed and emerging markets. Then, the conditions that determine whether store brands should be adopted by retailers are identified and discussed.
Findings
Five key factors have been identified that explain successful management approaches to introducing store brands in developed as compared to emerging markets. These include the number of store brand categories available, the quality of store brands, type of products, the manufacturers of the products and the number of product lines sold by retailers. Finally, the paper discusses the future of store brands in emerging markets and predicts that their penetration will closely follow the trend in developed countries.
Originality/value
This paper provides insights into what sort of strategies should be used by store managers in emerging markets to adopt store brands in order to satisfy the income levels of many of their customers. The use of store brands will not only provide more consumer satisfaction, but increased profits for the store.
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An OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Directory Service has recently been standardised in accord with the CCITT's X.500 recommendations. This OSI Directory (or X.500 Directory ā…
Abstract
An OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Directory Service has recently been standardised in accord with the CCITT's X.500 recommendations. This OSI Directory (or X.500 Directory ā the terms are used interchangeably) was developed with the priMary intention of providing support for electronic mail services, address lookāup of networked applications, and also white and yellow pages directory services. However, the OSI Directory has many of the features required for providing access to widely distributed bibliographic information. It offers the possibility of a unified bibliographic information framework; homogeneous access to bibliographic information; builtāin facilities for distributed searching; ānaturalā integration with other OSI services which may be used to provide bibliographic services, for example, electronic mail and file transfer. This paper first provides a brief tutorial on the OSI Directory. The paper then considers how the OSI Directory might be used to provide access to a range of bibliographic information, and be used in tandem with other OSI services to allow the retrieval of documents. The paper then examines some of the problems of providing access to bibliographic information given the current version of the X.500 standard. A project (ABDUX ā Accessing Bibliographic Data Using X.500) to investigate some of the ideas described in this paper is being funded by the British Library, and the paper notes the goals of this project.
Michael Nierla, Alexander Sutor, Stefan Johann Rupitsch and Manfred Kaltenbacher
This paper aims to present a novel stageless evaluation scheme for a vector Preisach model that exploits rotational operators for the description of vector hysteresis. It is meant…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to present a novel stageless evaluation scheme for a vector Preisach model that exploits rotational operators for the description of vector hysteresis. It is meant to resolve the discretizational errors that arise during the application of the standard matrix-based implementation of Preisach-based models.
Design/methodology/approach
The newly developed evaluation uses a nested-list data structure. Together with an adapted form of the Everett function, it allows to represent both the additional rotational operator and the switching operator of the standard scalar Preisach model in a stageless fashion, i.e. without introducing discretization errors. Additionally, presented updating and simplification rules ensure the computational efficiency of the scheme.
Findings
A comparison between the stageless evaluation scheme and the commonly used matrix approach reveals not only an improvement in accuracy up to machine precision but, furthermore, a reduction of computational resources.
Research limitations/implications
The presented evaluation scheme is especially designed for a vector Preisach model, which is based on an additional rotational operator. A direct application to other vector Preisach models that do not rely on rotational operators is not intended. Nevertheless, the presented methodology allows an easy adaption to similar vector Preisach schemes that use modified setting rules for the rotational operator and/or the switching operator.
Originality/value
Prior to this contribution, the vector Preisach model based on rotational operators could only be evaluated using a matrix-based approach that works with discretized forms of rotational and switching operator. The presented evaluation scheme offers reduced computational cost at much higher accuracy. Therefore, it is of great interest for all users of the mentioned or similar vector Preisach models.
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