Guest editorial

Citation

Dennis, D.C. and Tamira King, D. (2007), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Vol. 35 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrdm.2007.08935gaa.001

Guest editorial

About the Guest Editors

Dr Charles Dennis was elected as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) for work helping to modernise the teaching of the discipline. He is a Chartered Marketer and Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Retail Management at Brunel University, London, UK. The textbook Marketing the E-business (Harris and Dennis, 2002) and research-based E-retailing (Dennis et al., 2004) were published by Routledge; and research monograph Objects of Desire: Consumer Behaviour in Shopping Centre Choice, (Dennis, 2005) by Palgrave.

Dr Tamira King is a Marketing Lecturer and MSc Marketing course director at Brunel University. Her research interest is in a consumer behaviour named “deshopping” the ethics of fraudulent consumption and the evolutionary psychology of male and female shopping behaviours. Tamira works closely with retailers and her work aims to improve the management of customer service and the returns process. Tamira's teaching is in the areas of retail management and marketing.

The Retail Insights issue addresses some of the more applied aspects of social and experiential retailing. In the first article, Tony Kent and Dominic Stone consider social issues in a case study that demonstrates how a retail store's design relates to its brand, is influenced by and contributes to, its corporate values. The store (Body Shop) is well known in many countries but the findings are informed by previously unpublished author experience. The work is useful in drawing attention to the difficult, under-researched relationship between retail branding and design.

In the second paper, Rita Martenson also addresses the importance of store branding, studying the impact of corporate retailer image in grocery retailing in Sweden. The author finds that there is a strong relationship between the store as a brand, customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In the third paper, Thomas Maronick examines the impact of a festival marketplace (in the USA) on area residents' shopping, dining, and entertainment behaviour over an extended period. Festival markets are known to attract recreational shoppers and tourists but the findings also demonstrate the role of experiential retailing for local residents who are also attracted in for dining and entertainment.

Tillmann Wagner uses a means-end chain approach in the fourth paper, exploring the hierarchical nature of shopping motivation. The evidence finds four dominant motivational patterns: shopping pleasure, frictionless shopping, value seeking, and quality seeking. The implications are clarified by concrete retail attributes that allow retailers to correspond to these motivations. The paper is valuable in providing what may be the first empirical evidence of how consumers hierarchically organize cognitive structures relating to the benefits of shopping.

Privacy is well known to be a major issue in e-shopping but Ronan de Kervenoael, Didier Soopramanien, Jonathan Elms, and Alan Hallsworth demonstrate in the fifth paper that it can contribute to a positive shopping experience. The authors draw upon social practice theory to develop a conceptual framework for personal privacy. Using e-grocery as an illustration in a consumer-centred, bottom-up approach, they demonstrate the value of two-way dialogues with consumers on sensitive issues.

Finally, Salvatore Fiore and Shaun Kelly examine some of the issues concerning the use of sound in e-retail stores. They find that few e-retailers use sound. Those that do are mainly large corporations using audio to display products. There is a considerable potential to use sound as a part of the web atmosphere to improve the customer experience. The authors call on e-retailers to treat the online store interface as a tangible point of interaction rather than inferior replication of a bricks and mortar store.

In conclusion, we consider that this joint special issue of International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management and Retail Insights draws together a coherent body of research on social and experiential (e-)retailing for the first time. We hope that this will help researchers, government and retailers to keep these issues central to “win-win” strategies for improving shoppers' lifestyles.