Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Volume 44, Issue 7.

The focus of this issue is a mixture of digital retailing, external influences on retailing and retail brand development. These include the impact of category management (CM) on small, US-based local retailers, the phenomenon of the digitalization of retailing, the antecedents and consequences of trust in online shopping, the relationship between weather and retail shopping behaviour and the relationships between the different phases of the store brand evaluative process.

The motivation for the first paper by Hamister and Fortsch was to determine the performance impact for small, local retailers by the means of CM practice and implementation, and the degree to which those practices are deployed in developed economies. A survey based on existing scales was developed and distributed to small retailers in upstate New York, for which a total of 79 valid responses were received. The results suggest CM practices have a positive impact on the performance of small, local retailers. Category Captain and Minor Supplier performances are also positively related to CM execution. CM practices, however, do not have a direct significant influence on Minor Supplier performance, but rather have a cumulative impact through Category Captain and CM performances. Small retailers should implement CM principles informally to match with their specific limited resources and management structures. Additionally, results from this study also suggest that local retailers may benefit from leveraging suppliers through tighter relationships encompassed within CM.

Digitalization denotes an ongoing transformation of great importance for the retail sector. The second paper by Hagberg, Sundstrom and Egels-Zandén analyses the phenomenon of the digitalization of retailing by developing a conceptual framework that can be used to further delineate current transformations of the retailer-consumer interface. The paper develops a framework for digitalization in the retail-consumer interface that consists of four elements: exchanges, actors, offerings and settings. The findings suggest that digitalization transforms the following: retailing exchanges (in a number of ways and in various facets of exchange, including communications, transactions, and distribution); the nature of retail offerings (blurred distinctions between products and services, what constitutes the actual offering and how it is priced); retail settings (i.e. where and when retailing takes place); and the actors who participate in retailing (i.e. retailers and consumers, among other parties). The paper addresses a significant and ongoing transformation in retailing and develops a framework that can both guide future research and aid retail practitioners in analysing retailing's current transformation due to digitalization.

The third paper by Das examines the antecedents and consequences of trust in online shopping from an e-tail branding perspective. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data online from over 300 Indian e-tail shoppers with structural equation modelling (CB-SEM approach) used to analysis the data. The results found e-tailer awareness, e-tailer associations and e-tailer perceived quality as antecedents of trust in online shopping. The results also showed online trust positively influences the behavioural intentions namely purchase intention, repurchase and recommendation. The study examines the applicability and branding and brand management principles in an e-tail branding context. Theoretical and managerial implications of these results are further discussed.

The fourth paper by Arunraj and Ahrens aims at developing a model to analyse the relationship between weather and retail shopping behaviour (i.e. store traffic and sales). The data set for this research study is obtained from two food retail stores and a fashion retail store located in the same geographical location in Lower Bavaria, Germany. The weather data set was provided by a German weather service agency and the analysis was drawn using multiple linear regression with autoregressive elements (MLR-AR). The estimated coefficients of weather variables using MLR-AR model represent corresponding weather impacts on the store traffic and the sales. The snowfall has a significant effect on the store traffic and the sales in both food and fashion retail stores. In food retail store, the risk due to snowfall varies depending on the location of stores. There are also significant lagging effects of snowfall in the fashion retail store. However, the rainfall has a significant effect only on the store traffic in the food retail stores. In addition to these effects, the sales in the fashion retail store are highly affected by the temperature deviation. Unlike previous studies, the proposed model tries to consider autocorrelation property, main and interaction effects between weather variables, temperature deviation and lagging effects of snowfall on the store traffic or the sales.

The purpose of the fifth paper by Gómez-Suárez, Quiñones and Yagüe is to analyse the relationships between the different phases of the store brand evaluative process (i.e. attitude, preference and purchase intention) in an international context and to investigate how each of them is influenced by selected perceptual characteristics of consumers, psychographic consumer traits and product evaluative criteria. The data were obtained from a survey of over a 1,000 shoppers from six different countries. Consecutive chained multiple and logistic regression models that incorporated the main antecedents into each stage were applied. The main results suggest that quality inferences based on brand image and reputation have a significant positive effect on store brand attitude, that shoppers' propensity to explore and their risk perceptions are antecedents of store brand preference rather than store brand attitude, and finally impulsiveness has a significant positive impact on store brand purchase intention. This paper extends research on the consumer decision-making process by empirically demonstrating that store brand preference is a mediating variable between store brand attitude and store brand purchase intention.