International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management articles from August 1997

International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management archives from August 1997

Law for Retailers.
August 1, 1997... Bill Thomas, known to millions of Jimmy Young listeners as the "Legal Beagle", has written a legal guide for retailers. Written in down-to-earth, every-day language, and packed with checklists, tips, and warnings for the unwary, Law for...

Retailing trends in the USA: competition, consumers, technology and the economy.(Industry Overview)
August 1, 1997... Introduction Retailing in the USA continues to change at a whirlwind pace. Unprecedented growth along with store closures, mergers and consolidations, reinvention and redefinition of retail corporations, new market identifications are all...

Direct marketing in the USA: past failures and future promises.(Industry Overview)
August 1, 1997... Direct marketing should be a more dominant form of retailing in the USA, but it is not. In its purest form, direct marketing offers an opportunity to give the consumer what she/he demands when, where, and how he/she wants it. Given the...

International expansion of US retailers.(Industry Overview)
August 1, 1997... Introduction The USA is the largest mass market in the developed world. It has taken domestic retailers decades to expand from the east coast to the west coast, and from the northern border to the southern border. However, the time has come...

Retail market structure change: implications for retailers and consumers.
August 1, 1997... Introduction The trend towards format diversification is not unique to the USA. It is, however, in the US market where this trend is most visible. Format diversification and proliferation contributes to the "over-storing" of America. Bernard...

Retailing in the USA: an interpretation of current trends.
August 1, 1997... A good summary of the current state of retailing in the USA was made recently by the CEO of one of the nation's largest retailers when he told a friend that he longed for the "good old days" when he was a merchant building a franchise with the...

Adoption factors and electronic data interchange use: a survey of retail companies.
August 1, 1997... Introduction Advances in computer and communications technology have expanded the traditional role of information systems (IS) from the creation, storage, transformation and transmission of information within an organization...

Controlling shop crime in Britain: costs and trends.
August 1, 1997... Introduction Crime is a major source of loss for many retailers. By 1995, retail crime losses were equivalent to 0.3 per cent of the gross domestic product, and represented around 20-30 per cent of net retail profits (Speed et al, 1995). The...

Retailing in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East: a tale of two cities.
August 1, 1997... Introduction The recent interest by western academics and business writers in the potential of Russia as a market has been accelerated by the political reforms instituted in the Gorbachev era. As early in the reform timetable as 1988, the...

Case study: a Christmas fit for a Prince's square- the role of design in shopping centre positioning.
August 1, 1997... Context A shopping centre to compare with the great of Paris, Milan and New York was the original intention for the new infill shopping centre to be constructed in Glasgow's Buchanan Street, the most fashionable shopping area of the city,...

Factory outlets emerge as major growth sector in retail distribution market.
August 1, 1997... "Factory outlets are set to play an increasingly significant role in the retail distribution market following a recent surge in interest among retailers, property developers and investors", according to a new research report published by...

In-store catering set to become one billion pound sterling market.
August 1, 1997... The value of the in-store catering market is rising almost as fast as overall retail sales and set to exceed the [pounds]1 billion mark by 1999, according to a new report from retail consultants, Corporate Intelligence on Retailing. In-store...

Cross-party support for resale price maintenance on over-the-counter medicines.
August 1, 1997... A new survey reveals substantial cross-party support for protecting local pharmacies from the possible abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM) on non-prescription medicines, as sought by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The OFT...

The plastic card industry is on the brink of a revolution but will they get it right?
August 1, 1997... In the UK, trials of smart credit and debit cards are due to begin later this year and a full nationwide roll-out is planned for next year, Germany and a number of other countries plan to follow the same route and with similar timing. They are...

Barclays begins countdown to chip cards as "card cloning" grows.
August 1, 1997... Barclays reported today (Thursday, 20 February) that 1996 had been the fifth year in a row that it had succeeded in cutting plastic card fraud despite a forecast increase for the banking industry as a whole. The bank went on to call for...

Viewpoint: depth of priority. (implementing information technology strategies)
August 1, 1997... Prioritizing should be a company's No. 1 virtue. In the absence of priority, companies flounder, and employees become distracted. This inevitably leads to missed deadlines, over-extended budgets, and a resulting output different from what was...

Assessing brand loyalty in The Netherlands.
August 1, 1997... Brand loyalty erosion - fact or fiction? Has brand loyalty been replaced by price loyalty in The Netherlands, as has been widely suggested in the trade and marketing press? If this were the case, brand managers would have reason for...

Launching a virtual community. (sharing of common interests and needs through the Internet)
August 1, 1997... Championing the customer and work Virtual communities grouping people sharing common interests and needs are likely to be seen as threatening by the average company. John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong of management consultants McKinsey &...

German banks refocus on IT. (information technology)
August 1, 1997... In response to the sweeping changes taking place in the banking industry worldwide, German banks are having to throw off their conservatism and legacy systems in favor of a more assertive and innovative stance. The German banking market is...

Brand-name products boom in Japan.
August 1, 1997... Young consumers lead the trend Brand-name products are booming in Japan in a way not seen since the cash-rich 1980s, when high price was equated with status and consumers who had made huge paper profits from soaring land and stock prices were...

Selling in a global market.
August 1, 1997... It is some years since commentators began to urge companies to think globally but to act locally. But as brands compete in increasingly crowded markets their universe becomes cluttered and critical brand messages get confused. What is...

How Superdrug drew up its mission statement.
August 1, 1997... Health and beauty retailer Superdrug was so determined that its mission statement would be something everyone in the business could relate to and learn to live by day-to-day, that it sought the help of employees with wording it. The...

Internal communications: the Bass Brewers' approach.
August 1, 1997... As part of ongoing efforts to give its 4,000 employees the information they need to play a greater part in the business, Bass Brewers has introduced a fast electronic news service (FENS). The service represents the latest stage in the...

The development of a US retail format in Europe: the case of factory outlet centres.
August 1, 1997... Background Factory outlet centres were one of the fastest growing formats in US retailing in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, the increasing competition from a variety of retail formats and the maturity of the factory outlet concept in...

Store patronage and lifestyle factors: implications for grocery retailers.
August 1, 1997... Introduction Background "Outshopping" is defined as the consumer shopping outside of his or her local community for goods or services (LaForge et al., 1984). While numerous studies have identified key determinants of urban and suburban...

Proactive retail strategies based on consumer attitudes towards the community.
August 1, 1997... Introduction Retail businesses at one time largely competed with retailers in the same community or catalogue retailers. The advent of improved highway and public transit systems, televisions, more aggressive newspaper distribution, global...

Retailing and the Internet: a perspective on the top 100 US retailers.
August 1, 1997... How things have changed in just two short years! Two years ago few marketers had much of a presence on the Internet. Those who did were often selling some sort of computer apparatus complete with boring white and black text. In order to make an...