The evolving landscape of physical retailing necessitates a reevaluation of personalization approaches to meet existing market conditions and the demands of modern customers. In this context, the authors explore the interplay between human-enabled and technology-enabled personalization, offering an examination of their characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. The authors deconstruct the personalization process into three distinct stages, namely identification, implementation, and interaction, and discuss potential contingency factors of personalization in the physical retailing context. More so, the authors discuss the future of personalization in physical retailing along the three steps of the defined personalization process. In doing so, the authors lay out a research agenda that can serve as a valuable guide for future studies in this field.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2023.11.001

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Consumers who are uninterested in a TV ad or are annoyed by it may avoid the ad, limiting the effectiveness of not only the ad but also the remaining commercial break. Active avoidance—known as “zapping”—is potentially a major concern for both advertisers and broadcasters. In two studies, the authors investigate whether and why ad content drives or mitigates zapping and develop a conceptual framework linking multiple content factors to psychological reactions that then affect zapping. They test the content–zapping relationship by drawing on a dataset reflecting the zapping behavior of over 2,500 German television viewers combined with advertising data and content information for 1,315 spots representing 308 brands from 96 categories. The results of the first study show that ad creativity is associated with less zapping, whereas a strong information focus and a prominent or early integration of branding elements are associated with more zapping. The findings also reveal that the effects differ significantly for products with a utilitarian (vs. hedonic) consumption purpose and for search (vs. experience) goods. The results of the second study show that irritation (determined by, e.g., annoyance, feeling offended, or overwhelmed) vis-à-vis enjoyment acts as the central mechanism in explaining why ad content affects zapping.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221105818

Economic conditions may significantly affect households’ shopping behavior and, by extension, retailers’ and manufacturers’ firm performance. By explicitly distinguishing between two basic types of economic conditions—micro conditions in terms of households’ personal income and macro conditions in terms of the business cycle—this study analyzes how households adjust their grocery shopping behavior. The authors observe more than 5,000 households over eight years and analyze shopping outcomes in terms of what, where, and how much they shop and spend. Results show that micro and macro conditions substantially influence shopping outcomes, but in very different ways. Microeconomic changes lead households to adjust primarily their overall purchase volume—that is, after losing income, households buy fewer products and spend less in total. In contrast, macroeconomic changes cause pronounced structural shifts in households’ shopping basket allocation and spending behavior. Specifically, during contractions, households shift purchases toward private labels while also buying and consequently spending more than during expansions. During expansions, however, households increasingly purchase national brands but keep their total spending constant. The authors discuss psychological and sociological mechanisms that can explain the differential effects of micro and macro conditions on shopping behavior and develop important diagnostic and normative implications for retailers and manufacturers.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211036882

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Inner city centers not only provide opportunities for shopping, dining, and entertainment, but with their lively atmosphere and other vital attributes, also create attractive destinations for residents and tourists alike. However, inner city retailing, potentially the most important reason to visit an inner city, is facing serious competition from e-commerce and out-of-town shopping malls. Dying inner city centers have become a severe issue in recent years, worldwide. To counteract this devastating trend and ensure the vitality and viability of inner city centers, stakeholders from the public and private sectors regularly join their forces in initiatives to strengthen urban structures. However, academic insights into the contribution of retailing on perceived city attractiveness remain sparse. Relying on an extensive data set that combines survey and observational data, the authors are able to quantify a variety of inner city characteristics, ranging from its store and service provider portfolio to its ambience and accessibility, and measure their association with its perceived attractiveness. They show that a city's portfolio of retail stores is not only related to people's perceptions of the city's overall attractiveness but also perceptions of its ambience. However, not all retail categories contribute the same way; while the presence of clothing stores or booksellers is strongly associated with cities' ambience as well as attractiveness, other retail categories such as optometrists or electronics stores are negatively associated with consumers' inner city perceptions. Importantly, these relationships also depend on the size of the focal city. Based on their results, the authors provide important managerial and societal implications on how to leverage the local retailing environment to improve inner city attractiveness. For example, the results may inform (local) governments on which sectors to subsidize in order to attract those store and service provider categories that benefit inner city attractiveness.

https://doi.org/10.1108/S1548-643520210000018011

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788114899