Guest editorial

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Volume 41, Issue 4

The special issue presents the best papers from the first Colloquium on European Retail Research (CERR). This colloquium was held in May 2012 in Paris, France. It is the result of the collaboration of five European scientific research laboratories. Among those, the Centre of Expertise and Research in Retail (ESSCA-CeRR), lodged within the ESSCA School of Management, was the main sponsor and organising entity. The CERR’s aim is to offer researchers from all over Europe, on a bi-annual basis a meeting place to share in a congenial environment the result of their latest research. The other partners were Heriot-Watt University, the University of Surrey, the University of Bremen and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. The next research colloquium will be held in Hamburg in 2014.

The purpose of the first contribution by Bezes is to assess whether the image of a retailer – beyond the distinct contributions of the website and the stores – is improved by the perceived congruence of its channels, and for what types of customers. An online survey was conducted taken from the behavioural databases of a major French multichannel retailer. Structural modelling and one-way ANOVA were used to test the working hypotheses. The findings suggest that congruent channels improve retailer image even when these channels have a less good image. However, channel congruence cannot be elevated to a universal guiding principle as it only affects multichannel and online buyers, with no detrimental impact on retailer image. In order to improve its image, a multichannel retailer must seek maximum congruence of its website and stores. Congruent channels lead to benefits for the retailer even when they are poorly valued by consumers. This paper is also one of the first published researches that use congruence as a mediating variable.

The second paper by Deli-Gray, Arva and Matura aims at evaluating the results of an empirical research whose objective was the analysis of the impact of the actual economic crisis on the expectations, preferences and attitudes of the Hungarian people towards the purchase of food and household items in retail stores. A sample of 1000 people was randomly selected and data was collected by pre-tested questionnaire. By main component analyses twelve main components were identified and a k-component cluster analysis was performed. The findings of the empirical research show that people of the same country react entirely differently to the crisis from a behavioural point of view and that in Hungary the economic crisis resulted in the social polarisation of the citizens. The paper gives an evidence for the social polarisation of the Hungarian people which has a serious impact on their purchases in retail stores and which makes the retail store managers rethink their actual strategy and positioning.

The third paper by Cao and Pederzoli analyses the international retailers’ strategic responses to the institutional environment in emerging markets. The research is based on in-depth interviews with senior managers from a grounded-theory perspective and provides a comprehensive analysis of the implications of the institutional environment for the strategic choices of international retailers in an emerging market, especially in China. The findings suggest that the international retailer’s strategic choices are often identified as pragmatism, dynamism, public policy-orientation, seeking lead position in the market and decentralisation if the institutional distance between the home country and host country is high. Moreover, when international retailers can commit to cultivating local markets and creating shared added value, they are better able to respond proactively to an institutional environment that is geared to a collective social network and still in a phase of transition. The major value of this paper is to highlight the specificities of international retailers’ strategic responses to the institutional environment of an emerging market. Attention to these specificities would enable researchers to analyse more actually the reality of retail internationalisation process in emerging market.

The final contribution by Meijer and Bhulai studies the optimal pricing problem that retailers are challenged with when dealing with seasonal products. The friction between expected demand and realized demand creates a risk that supply during the season is not cleared and thus forcing the retailer to markdown overstocked supply. A proposed framework based on a Cox regression analysis to determine optimal markdown paths is given. The framework is investigated using a case study based on a large department store. The framework determines when and how much to markdown in order to optimize expected total profit given the available supply. When the law of demand holds at a disaggregated level, i.e., the individual retailer, we can also optimize the markdown path. This paper provides a framework for the complex dynamic pricing problem in retail using transactional data. The case study shows that significant revenues can be generated when applying this framework.

Xavier BrussetGuest Editor