Editorial

Citation

Fernie, J. (2009), "Editorial", International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Vol. 37 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijrdm.2009.08937gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, Volume 37, Issue 7

This issue has three papers on shopping centres, two from Australia and one from Portugal. The other two papers are on internal marketing and marketing orientation by Greek and Spanish authors. Vaughan Reimers and Valeria Clulow have undertaken an interesting piece of research into time convenience on shopping behaviour. It is well known that many shoppers are “time poor” despite the offer of 24 h shopping and internet shopping. Their research measured time convenience in the context of consumers’ attitudes to retail centres, specifically in the greater Melbourne area of Australia. From a survey of 541 respondents gleaned from a Dun and Bradsheet database, they found that time convenience did serve as an important element of retail centre patronage with no significant differences in response in terms of age, income, gender and retail centre preference. The second paper, also from Australia, by Alan Simon, Chris Frame and Amrik Sohal, discusses the impact of a takeover of a shopping centre on individual retailers in the complex. Through a mixture of data collection methods the authors show that there were many negative reactions by retailers to the acquisition. They suggest that the new company could have mitigated against such negativity through greater participation in and communication about the change process.

Our third shopping centre paper is by Pedro Quelhas Brito from Portugal. The paper explores the shopping centre image dynamics of a new shopping centre in Porto by undertaking a two staged survey on opening and then seven months later. This allowed the author to track image variations over time and recommend to managers that strong promotion is not enough to sustain a customer base but to create an appropriate retail mix to influence patronage.

Our next paper from Greece by George G. Panigyrakis and Prokopis K. Theodoridis discusses the impact of internal marketing on retail performance. After initial in depth interviews with selected branch managers of Greek supermarkets, questionnaires were sent to 1,288 nationwide managers from which 265 replied. Results show that the role of the manager is now more routine, day to day work rather than that of a strategic nature. Overall, however, internal marketing had a positive effect not only on financial but non-financial performance. The final paper by Cayetano Medina and Ramón Rufín from Spain also uses market orientation as a tool in strategic analysis. The authors also use structural equation modelling as a technique to data derived from the CAMERATA database to select the largest companies. From the 244 responses the results show that market driving proved to be a strong predictor of performance in addition to innovation acting as a mediator between strategic orientations in retailers and business performance.

John Fernie