Editorial

Citation

Fernie, J. (2009), "Editorial", International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Vol. 37 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrdm.2009.08937eaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Volume 37, Issue 5

This issue covers a range of topics from authors in the USA, UK and New Zealand. Our first paper is by Hira Cho and Susan Fiorito, a member of our editorial board. Their aim was to identify the key determinants of customisation of apparel products through the internet. Using jeans as the product to be customised, they undertook an online survey of 300 female adults in the USA and found that the security of the website was a key factor in the customisation process in addition to reducing risk and building trust with customers by maintaining these sites to make them easy to navigate and use. Our second paper also relates to online purchasing. Delia Vazquez and Xingang Xu from Manchester University examine the relationships between online consumer behaviour constructs of attitude, motivation and information search to develop a conceptual model. From an e-mail survey of 577 respondents, it was shown that motivational variables have a significant causal relationship with information search variables.

The theme of online shopping is picked up in the paper by Hyun-Hwa Lee and Jihyun Kim in their paper on gift shopping behaviour through a variety of retail channels. Their paper sought to examine the relationships between a consumer’s experience in shopping for themselves compared with purchasing gifts for others. From a survey of 171 college students, it was shown that all five retail channels were used and there were positive relationships between consumers’ product purchase experiences for their own use and their gift purchase experience.

Our final two papers are from New Zealand. Andrew Parsons provides us with an interesting paper on the use of scent as a prompt to consumers to entice their attitudes to specific stores. He chose three types of store which were naturally odourless – a bookshop, lingerie store and a white goods shop and identified scents associated with them, viz. coffee, perfume and soap, respectively. Through an experiment and field survey, he manipulated the scents to monitor consumer perceptions of the store measured. The results show that in a natural odourless store consumers react positively to a scent which has an association with the store – bookstore/coffee and negatively to a non-associated scent bookstore/soap. Our final paper is also from New Zealand by Andrea Insch and Magdalena Florek. The purpose of their study was to investigate the prevalence of country of origin associations on product labels/packages across a range of grocery products in a New Zealand supermarket. From a content analysis of 788 brands, the majority featured at least one country of origin association, i.e. made in New Zealand or Australia. The authors comment that a more flexible approach to labelling by regulators may be necessary, especially as “pure” New Zealand manufacturers are less likely to adopt the “made in” slogan sold in New Zealand supermarkets.

John Fernie