This new edition of Contemporary Retail and Marketing Case Studies is a collection of 34 studies of retail and marketing operations as told by individual companies.

Small, medium and larger companies relate the challenges they have faced and how they overcame them, and share their successes and frustrations in a frank and open manner. Each case is unique in its own way and addresses issues which are pertinent and relevant to the South African retail and marketing environment.

The value of this collection is that:

• It provides a variety of cases that together offer insight into the marketing challenges faced by local businesses
• It offers a South African perspective on how to overcome these issues
• It is written from the viewpoint of the entrepreneur or business executive
• It provides practical insights which support work-integrated learning.

This book is a must-read for scholars, students and people concerned with the retail and marketing industry.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have long played a crucial role in the Chinese economy. This role is one that is set to continue in the post-pandemic era as China works to transit to a high-quality growth model that is more sustainable and innovation-driven. With global experience and front-line involvement in some of the most pressing economic, technological, and environmental issues of our day, leading figures in MNCs and chambers of commerce are well placed to share insights that could potentially contribute to policymaking and development strategies so that everyone can "make the most" of China's future. This collection of essay aims to share these invaluable insights with a wider audience, offering balanced and diverse perspectives from companies and advocacy groups working on a range of issues related to China's domestic development, international economic cooperation, and China-US competition. These insights are useful not only for the wider business community, but also for academics, policymakers, students, and anyone trying to deepen their understanding of this exciting period of "transition and opportunity," and make the most of China's bright future.

Multinational enterprises have become a main engine of the global economy, technical advancement, and product innovation, playing a pivotal role in the world economy and the global technological revolution. However, MNEs are also often embroiled in financial fraud and corporate scandal which show that MNEs should improve their corporate governance. Meanwhile, as COVID- 19 runs rampant across the world, populism and deglobalisation have resurged, and protectionism and unilateralism are exerting negative impacts on the world economy. Achieving sustainable development in this context is a test of a company's management and governance abilities. How should they be governed? This book will be a useful tool for university research-led teaching and fundamental research in corporate governance theories of MNEs in general, as well as using Chinese case studies as evidence to support our theoretical arguments.

Qualitative Market Research follows through a complete research project from the perspective of both user and practitioner. In this respect, it can be used as both a continuous teaching text and training manual, or individual sections may be consulted to enhance knowledge of `best practices' and improve productivity in any specific research application. Section one begins with an overview of the history and philosophy behind the practice of qualitative research, using qualitative or quantitative approaches, organizing qualitative research (particularly those in `practice' such as research consultants), qualitative research applications (including product development, branding and advertising) and the varieties of qualitative research methods. Section two looks at the management of qualitative research and discusses project management, planning and budgeting issues. Section three looks at group moderation and interviewing techniques, and section four addresses the whole area of collecting and analyzing qualitative data, including discussion of computer-assisted software methods, as well as research reporting. This book meets the needs of several audiences by creating some common ground in the applied practice of qualitative research. It should consequently be invaluable reading to a wide readership, from social research methods students (particularly those in sociology, business, psychology, education, marketing and market research) to worldwide practitioners of qualitative research, both clients and consultants.

". . . a comprehensive survey of the topic . . . a complete resource and a fundamental yet creative cookbook . . . Mariampolski offers detailed suggestions on how to effectively set up each particular type of project with step-by-step guidelines on how to proceed at each stage along the way. . . . It will be very interesting to those who wish to work in marketing, advertising, or research."

--Journal of Advertising Research

We know how eager you are to learn practical workplace skills at university so that you are "job ready" following graduation. In marketing, one of the most practical things you can learn how to do is create a sound marketing plan. This new book guides you concisely through the marketing planning process from start to finish, drawing on examples from large brands like Ikea and Krispy Kreme to digital start-ups like Starling Bank. Features a running case study about a small services business that breaks the marketing plan down into easy to digestible chunks. A dedicated chapter on marketing strategy concepts to help you understand how they link to market, firm or decision-related factors. Self-test questions and scenarios with tasks throughout make for an active learning experience. Practical in its step-by-step approach and inclusion of activities and scenarios and written simply whilst still underpinned by marketing strategy scholarship, this book will help you to develop your marketing decision-making throughout by learning key skills such as how to do a SWOT analysis and how to budget and forecast correctly. Supported by online resources for lecturers including PowerPoint slides, an instructor's manual and a suggested syllabus. Suitable reading for marketing planning and marketing strategy courses.

The goal of this book is to help business managers and academic researchers understand the means-end perspective and the methods by which it is used, and to demonstrate how to use the means-end approach to develop better marketing and advertising strategy. The authors discuss methodological issues regarding interviewing and coding, present applications of the means-end approach to marketing and advertising problems, and describe the conceptual foundations of the means-end approach.
This book is of interest to academic researchers in marketing and related fields, graduate students in business, marketing research professionals, and business managers. It is intended as a reference book containing ideas about the means-end approach and its applications.

This major reference book provides an authoritative analysis and survey of consumer research and economic psychology. It provides an international, in-depth overview of the present state of knowledge and theory which will be indispensable to students, researchers and practitioners. The Companion presents over 100 specially commissioned entries on important topics in consumer research and economic psychology from behaviourism and brand loyalty to trust and the psychology of tourism. Leading scholars in the fields provide stimulating insights into the area as well as summarising existing knowledge. Readers will find entries both on new topics that have rarely been considered in the framework of consumer research or economic psychology and on topics that have long been considered important in these disciplines. The book will ably meet the needs of undergraduate and graduate students in business administration, economics, marketing and psychology, as well as informing researchers and practitioners in those disciplines.

This Handbook examines the area of consumer behavior from the perspective of current developments and developing areas for the discipline, to new opportunities that comprehend the nature of consumer choice and its relationship to marketing. Consumer research incorporates perspectives from a spectrum of long-established sciences: psychology, economics and sociology. This Handbook strives to include this multitude of sources of thought, adding geography, neuroscience, ethics and behavioral ecology to this list. Encompassing scholars with a passion for researching consumers, this Handbook highlights important developments in consumer behavior research, including consumer culture, impulsivity and compulsiveness, ethics and behavioral ecology. It examines evolutionary and neuroscience perspectives as well as consumer choice. Undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in marketing with interests in consumer behavior will find this enriching resource invaluable. Contributors: P.J. Albanese, R. Belk, C.S. Craig, S.P. Douglas, G.R. Foxall, R.E. Goldsmith, L. Green, C.S. Gulas, D.A. Hantula, M. Hubert, U. Javed, P. Kenning, M. Linzmajer, L.L. Oliveira, K. Peattie, D. Ross, H. Timmermans, R.H. Tsiotsou, M.G. Weinberger, M.F. Weinberger, V.K. Wells, J. Wirtz, M. Yani-de-Soriano, S.Y. Yousafzai, J.L. Zaichkowsky

Gendering Theory in Marketing and Consumer Research showcases state-of-the-art scholarship on gender in the field of marketing and consumer research. The book presents seven original contributions by a group of internationally renowned academics, who take up the task of theorising gender and gendering theory in new ways, accommodating recent intersectional, material-discursive, and practice-oriented theorisations. Connecting the study of marketing and consumer behaviour to different theoretical perspectives on gender, the contributors explore and critically examine the gendered nature and dimensions of contemporary marketplace activity. Through innovative conceptual development and insightful empirical analyses, the book offers important scholarly contributions to the literature on gender, marketing, and consumer research, and advances our understanding of gender as lived experience and socially regulated performance. It also frequently employ an intersectionalist perspective, theorising gender as only a part of one's subject position, which is constituted by mutually reinforcing categories. The book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in the implications and contemporary manifestations of gender as a cultural category in the marketplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

The nature of work is changing, due to demographic shifts, globalization, and digitization. Regional local labor markets are in global competition for (highly) qualified and specialized workers. At the same time, the workforce's desire for flexibility and the increasing speed at which skill requirements are changing are producing disparities at the spatial, social, and economic levels. This book discusses the global and local drivers behind these developments. It explores the factors which cause global inequalities between urban and rural areas, and highlights how cities, regions and countries attract these sought-after employees to address skills shortages. The book includes an in-depth case study on high-skilled workers in South Tyrol, Italy. No single academic discipline can adequately capture the dynamics of the future labor market, and the authors therefore take an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from different disciplines. This book will be a valuable resource for policymakers, students and researchers seeking to understand the driving forces behind the ever-changing labor market and the future of high-skilled work.

Series Information:
Routledge International Studies in Money and Banking

Series Information:
Routledge Interpretive Marketing Research

Consumer research has traditionally focused on issues of epistemology in the collection and analysis of data. As a consequence, the crisis in representation which has radically reshaped understanding in the social sciences, has, so far, had very little impact on consumer research. This book redresses the balance with an investigation of representation and constructions of 'truth' in consumer research. Subjects covered include:
* construction of the researcher and consumer voice
* quantitative tools and representation
* advertising narratives
* poetic representation of consumer experience
* the crisis in the crisis concept
* consumer-oriented ethnographic research.
The essays are written by experts from Britain and the United States and draw on a broad range of theoretical approaches.

Taste is a core concept for the social sciences and an orienting notion in everyday practice. It is of equal relevance to academics and laypeople alike. Theorizations of taste are frequently multi- disciplinary, bringing an opportunity to cross-fertilize ideas and concepts. At the same time, a reader, challenged by the diverse body and dispersed nature of theories on taste, needs guidance navigating the literature and framing areas of interest. Until now, those interested in an academic perspective on the concept have had to traverse a wide range of literature. This is the first book that assembles a range of writings on taste from across disciplines to provide the reader with a sense of the emerging and expanding boundaries of this field of study. Taste, Consumption and Markets offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of taste, with an emphasis on how taste shapes boundaries, subcultures, and global culture, complemented by an introduction that provides a scaffold for the reader and a concluding section that reflects on the past, present, and future of research on taste. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to the sociology of taste and consumption and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of consumer studies, consumption ethics, sociological perspectives on consumption, and cultural studies.

Consumer Value is one of the few books which attempts to define and analyse exactly what it is that consumers want. The theme of 'serving' the customer and customer satisfaction is central to every formulation of the marketing concept.
The major types of value are identified and related to one another through an innovative framework based around the following eight concepts:
* efficiency
* excellence
* status
* esteem
* play
* aesthetics
* ethics
* spirituality
With an international range of contributors and a highly individualistic approach, this book is guaranteed to provoke controversy.

As shoppers, what factors influence our decision to purchase an object or service? Why do we chose one product over another? How do we attribute value as part of the shopping experience?
The theme of 'serving' the customer and customer satisfaction is central to every formulation of the marketing concept, yet few books attenpt to define and analyse exactly what it is that consumers want. In this provocative collection of essays, Morris Holbrook brings together a team of the top US and European scholars to discuss an issue of great importance to the study of marketing and consumer behaviour.
This ground-breaking, interdisciplinary book provides an innovative framework for the study of consumer value which is used to critically examine the nature and type of value that consumers derive from the consumption experience - effiency, excellence, status, esteem, play, aesthetics, ethics, spirituality.
Guaranteed to provoke debate and controversy, this is a courageous, individualistic and idiosyncratic book which should appeal to students of marketing, consumer behaviour, cultural studies and consumption studies.

How do customers decide what products and brands to buy? With the rise of sophisticated advertising and marketing research methods in this century, business leaders have spent billions of dollars attempting to answer this perplexing question. Occasionally, analysts emerge with suggestive trends, but ultimately with little hard evidence to support any definitive "laws" of customer choice.

Now, in this much-anticipated major work, Eric Marder reveals how universal patterns in survey responses lead not only to general principles in marketing but to empirically verifiable laws of human nature itself. Drawing on forty years of applying his pioneering experimental design techniques to marketing research surveys, Marder presents a global theory of choice behavior, supported by original data reported here for the first time from thousands of massive real-life experiments based on millions of interviews. His dramatic findings about pricing, optimal marketing tactics, product evaluation, the relative role of product and image, and advertising effectiveness will make this book required reading for the entire marketing community. Of special interest to social scientists and survey research practitioners will be Marder's powerful research designs and techniques, including the unbounded write-in scale for measuring desirability (attitude) and his methodological analyses of the relationships among beliefs (perceptions), desires, choice, and behavior.

In the Preface, he writes: "At the core of the theory are three laws of choice behavior the Law of Congruence, the Law of Primacy, and the Law of Persistence. These laws are both general and self-evident. At first glance, they are so self-evident that you might say: 'I have known this all along.' My reply is: 'Of course you have known it all along. But there is a difference between knowing and knowing, between the passive knowing that allows us to persist in actions that are inconsistent with what we know, and the active knowing that helps us change the way we do things.' I believe that knowing the laws of choice behavior-really knowing them -- changes the way we do things. My crass but stringent criterion has been that a good theory should enable someone equipped with it to make more money than someone who isn't. I believe my theory has passed this test."

In recent years the study of consumption has become one of the most important areas of knowledge in the social sciences. In business studies and marketing, the nature of consumer research has undergone a profound change. Postmodern perspectives which challenge and undermine previously held notions of consumer identity, belief and decision-making have radically altered our understanding of consumer practice and marketing theory. This volume is a collection of essays by exponents of postmodern consumer research from Europe and America. Topics covered include: chronicle, composition and fabulation in consumer research; postmodern approaches to pluralism in consumer research; marketing in cyberspace; poststructuralism in marketing; and semiotics in marketing and consumer research.

In recent years the study of consumption has become one of the most important areas of knowledge in the social sciences. In business studies and marketing, the nature of consumer research has undergone a profound change. Postmodern perspectives which challenge and undermine previously held notions of consumer identity, belief and decision-making have radically altered our understanding of consumer practice and marketing theory.
Consumer Research: Postcards from the Edge is a collection of cutting-edge essays by leading exponents of postmodern consumer research from Europe and America. Topics covered include:
* chronicle, composition and fabulation in consumer research
* postmodern approaches to pluralism in consumer research
* marketing in cyberspace
* poststructuralism in marketing
* semiotics in marketing and consumer research.
Original and ground-breaking, Consumer Research: Postcards from the Edge is an invaluable resource for all those interested in new directions in business and marketing.

Social Marketing: marketing in the service of societal problems. Does this approach represent dangerous social engineering, or is it the best hope we have to treat what are often regarded as intransigent problems? For both academics and practitioners involved with social marketing, the domain remains in its infancy. Programs and approaches are being developed and implemented by practitioners; academics are defining "what it is," "where it comes from," and "where it is going."
This book incorporates many of the presentations made at the "Role of Advertising in Social Marketing" Conference sponsored by the Society for Consumer Psychology. Professionals from academia, government, and non-government organizations address a highly diverse and interesting set of societal concerns ranging from organ donation to violence in sports, from efforts to promote safe sex and family planning to better understand cigarette smokers and their perceptions. Are marketing's "four Ps"--product, price, place, and promotion--enough to help solve these problems, or does social marketing at the end of the 1990s need to call on other Ps, such as political persuasion? This volume thoughtfully addresses theoretical and empirical issues challenging academics and practitioners alike to find out how to borrow the best of marketing for application in social marketing.

Studying the Audience: The Shock of the Real provides a critical overview of two decades of research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as `a new and exciting phase' in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of `ordinary people' watching television, combining interviews and participant observations with textual analysis of television programmes.
In a comprehensive analysis of the orgins and achievements of the `cultural studies audience experiment', Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morley's work on Nationwide, Ien Ang's Watching Dallas and David Buckingham's study of Eastenders and its audience.
Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies were challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a complex activity.

"Studying Audiences; The Shock of the Real" provides a critical overview of two decades of research into the television audience. With the development of ethnographic research methods, hailed by Stuart Hall as "a new and exciting phase" in audience research, researchers turned their critical attention to groups of "ordinary people" watching television, combining interviews and participant observations with textual analysis of television programs.
In a comprehensive analysis of the origins and achievements of the "cultural studies audience experiment," Virginia Nightingale evaluates five projects which helped to shape the field of television audience research, including Charlotte Brunsdon and David Morely's work on "Nationwide," Ien Ang's "Watching Dallas" and David Buckingham's study of "Eastenders" and its audience. Nightingale traces how central tenets within audience studies were challenged by discourses of post-colonialism, fan activism and new theories of writing, arguing that audience research is necessarily a complex activity.

Semiotics is a superpower for marketers. It generates profits for brands. It's a proven, powerful method of uncovering consumer insight and tailoring brand strategies that work. Companies such as Unilever and P&G attest to the success of Lawes semiotics in stimulating innovation and boosting sales. This book makes semiotics accessible. You can do semiotics. All agency-side and client-side marketers can pick up the skills to use and apply semiotics to brands. Using Semiotics in Marketing is an acclaimed how-to guide. It's the only book on semiotics ever published that sets out a complete blueprint for research projects. Clear instructions show how to write briefs and proposals, design projects, conduct analysis, write reports and present research findings. Newly updated, this second edition is packed with even more revelations about brands, consumers and their emerging needs. Three new chapters reveal the unseen social forces that drive the Be Kind movement, public appetite for sincerity and the emotions of younger generations. Start using semiotics today. Position and launch new brands. Rejuvenate established brands. Design products and packaging. Inspire timely and provocative ad campaigns. Innovate. See the future.

Market Research in Action is an examination of various marketing research techniques using a running case study based on a real product. The use of this device shows how research impacts on product development and the product launch, with particular reference to fast moving consumer goods. To demonstrate other marketing research techniques the author has added additional cases introducing a selection of techniques to show how these techniques are developed or used in different arenas, for instance while dealing with service products or marketing in a retail, international and B2B marketing environment.

In recent years, luxury goods markets have faced significant changes that have influenced both the dynamics of the competition, as well as their strategies. The principal changes include the following: new geographical market development, such as in the Far East, India, and some parts of Africa (these countries are added to a list of already relevant countries that are involved in luxury goods consumption, such as the Emirates, Russia, and South America); diffusion of new media and new technologies in communication, which is characterized by a high degree of interaction; the evolution of distribution channels is underway - these channels are moving towards new forms of integration that utilize both physical digital channels. This has forced firms to revise their strategies and implement multichannel marketing strategies to continue to operate in increasingly international markets that are characterized by increasingly more demanding and informed consumers. This book will enable readers to gain a clear insight into how the luxury goods market operates and amongst other things, focuses on: recent internet and social media strategies adopted by luxury companies and their brands; how luxury companies manage their communication and distribution channels to compete in the market and the impact of digital marketing on their competition; the main models of direct and indirect distribution in the digital channels; how consumers react to multichannel strategies; trends, social commerce and CSR and how luxury companies react; identifying the different social media strategies for luxury companies.