Marketing Geography

• Market Structure in the Network Age - E-commerce will undoubtedly change the way business is done. But as we have said elsewhere, "technology changes, economic laws do not." Despite the changes introduced by e-commerce, many of the fundamental principles of competition will still be relevant.
  In this paper I investigate three aspects of competition in ecommerce: marketing, interconnection, and price matching. In each case I will describe the phenomenon, illustrate its relevance for ecommerce, and describe some research issues raised.
• Tutorials : The New Expanding Markets - New markets will open as geoprocessing enters mainstream IT. The following discussion highlights the expanding opportunities in consumer, business and government markets.
• Internet retail store design: How the user interface influences traffic and sales - Given the resources needed to launch a retail store on the Internet or change an existing online storefront design, it is important to allocate product development resources to interface features that actually improve store traffic and sales. We identified features that impact store traffic and sales using regression models of 1996 store traffic and dollar sales as dependent variables and interface design features such as number of links into the store, hours of promotional ads, number of products, and store navigation features as the independent variables. Product list navigation features that reduce the time to purchase products online account for 61% of the variance in monthly sales. Other factors explaining the variance in monthly sales include: number of hyperlinks into the store (10%), hours of promotion (4%) and customer service feedback (1%). These findings demonstrate that the user interface is an essential link between the customer and the retail store in Web-based shopping environments.
• Online Buying Defies Site Selection Folklore - The growth of online buying undermines the key assumptions in site selection analysis used by mass merchandisers. The rise of the non-geocentric buying habit presents new risks for property investors and lenders. Furthermore, current techniques fail to anticipate the impact of online buying, giving developers and retailers potentially false signals on new store profitability. The pervasive belief wired customers will continue to shop in the same old way is an idea ready for the dustbin of history.
• At the Cutting Edge: UK Clothing Retailers and Global Sourcing - This paper examines the implications for developing country producers of changes in UK retailers' global sourcing practices. It examines to what extent UK retailers have adopted the 'lean retailing' paradigm, with its implications of a shift of sourcing `nearer to home'. On the basis of a detailed examination of unpublished UK import data and interviews with leading retailers it concludes that, although the paradigm has considerable influence in the UK, sourcing patterns especially of leading retailers remain heavily price-based and for this reason heavily focused on developing countries. On the other hand, UK retailers have escalated their qualifying criteria for suppliers in line with the new paradigm, implying that only the most resourceful developing country enterprises will find a place in UK retailers' global sourcing networks.
• Electronic Commerce, Retailing, Marketing & Distribution Systems
• E-Marketing High-Tech-Locations by Fractal Excavation - Worldwideweb-like interactive multimedia services are virtually transforming the competitive environment of City-Marketing and High-Tech-Marketing-Systems. Such Literary Machines can boost the diffusion of technologies - if they are employed. But adoption - not unavailable technology was recently identified as THE bottleneck of European Technology-Management. Public and private investors may map this second-order problem with a meta concept featuring fractally scaling generaters of differentiated percolations and lacunarities of consciousness and exchange. Well-documented success factors of High-Tech Marketing are interpreted in this context as to suggest rapid prototyping of local public-access cluster-webs.
• Exploratory Research On The Implications Of The Theory Of Autopoiesis In International Consumer Behavior - Prevailing consumer behavior models conceptualize the generation of behavior in terms of information-processing and problem-solving. A new theory has emerged that purports to explain human behavior in very different terms. This theory takes into account the biological basis of human cognition as developed from a general theory of living systems. This paper examines the implications of the Theory of Autopoiesis and its associated Theory of Cognition in the assessment and formulation of Theories of International Consumer Behavior.
• Business Geographics - May 2001 - The Graying of North America's Malls: Can GIS Help Save the Traditional Shopping Mall Model?
• Flexibility and Uncertainty in Retail Location Decisions - In our world, humans have certain needs in life, whether it be food, clothing, furniture, automobile, etc.  We obtain these necessary items in life through stores and shops that carry these goods for our consumption.  How do these goods get there?  These shops are stores and what we refer to as retail establishments.  Their sole purpose is to maximize utility (utility is defined here as net profit).  In order to achieve this, they must consider a number of criteria that can dictate their success as a retail establishment.  These criteria/principles are well outlined by R. Nelson, the author of the book, ³The selection of Retail Locations².
• Choosing A Retail Location (Part 1 of 2)
• Choosing A Retail Location - Shopping Center Location (Part 2 of 2)
• Re-Mapping the World of Consumers - What does a middle-aged mother in Mexico have in common with a young man in Russia, but not with a middle-aged mother in Brazil? You'd be surprised. Why does it matter? Because in an increasingly global business environment, it becomes critical to maximize marketing efforts across markets, both demographic and geographic. Finding common ground is the key to creating effective and efficient messages that provide the most bang for the marketing buck. (For the answer to the question posed above, see end of story.)
• Trends in Retail Trade - This fact sheet identifies and describes 10 major trends in the retail trade sector. Details and statistics for the following trends are discussed: the growth of e-commerce, kids in the retail market, building customer knowledge files, the American mall in decline, challenging the category killer, precision shopping, entertaining the customer, globalization of retail trade, smart cards, and the general decline in retail sales growth.
• 21st Century Markets: From Places to Spaces - Throughout history, markets have always re-created themselves, shifting the economic fortunes of those present at the creation. In this paper we discover how e-commerce alters the dimensions of time, place and form to alter fundamental notions of what a market is and how it operates. We explain what the shift from marketplaces to marketspaces means - and, what it portends. We look at new forms of intermediaries, cybermediaries. We explore the need for companies to appear in multiple, simultaneous roles in multiple, simultaneous marketspaces. Then we drill deeper to look at the business case for I-markets, their inter-enterprise business processes and the agile software needed to support new and changing business models. Armed with this framework, we move on to describe the key dimensions of strategy that companies will need in order to succeed as 21st century markets transform from places to spaces.
• Multimedia: Human Beings, Society, & Business - The meaning of multimedia differs depending on one's perspective. To the telecommunications industry, multimedia means construction of a broadband telecommunication network, because that is the biggest task for them in dealing with multimedia applications. To the broadcasting industry, broadband communication in the form of picture transmission is no problem. Multimedia to them means interactive communication. To the computer industry, interactive communication and broadband communication is no problem at all. Multimedia to them means high speed processing of data in an extremely big volume for applications such as virtual reality.
  Then what is the definition of multimedia? It is too early to define the term because various multimedia are still in the incubation stage. In this papaer, I shall define multimedia as "a group of systems to create, store, process, dispatch and receive information by means of a variety of media in a variety of expressions; also a category of industry to develop in connection with such systems." In what follows I discuss multimedia from the viewpoint of effects and functions.
  ... After the multimedia revolution, users will place an order on-line or at the shop, and will designate all the specifications. Manufacturers will accept these orders on the basis of on-demand production. This is again a user-oriented market. The commodity will be user's brains, or on-line in the form of electronic catalogues, thus being a virtual commodity.
• Clusters of Commercial Locations in Canada - There are more than 30-million Canadians, within 1 million households, living in hundreds, even thousands, of communities scattered across a country more than 8,000 kilometres wide. This paper is a first attempt at the description of the enormous variety of commercial nodes that serve them. It is based on the Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity (CSCA) format file that includes almost 140,000 stores that comprise almost 5,000 formats or store names. By using a variety of multivariate procedures, the stores in more thanl,100 locations (3-digit postal codes called FSAS) are compared in terms of 129 types of business (the 4-digit Standard Industrial Classification), and in the mix of formats (brand names) or companies that are found there.
  The first section of the paper introduces the research problem, the data, and the analytical procedures. The second section presents the first set of results that focus on the variation in amount of commercial activity and the functional specialization of the node. This is followed by a less conventional analysis that examines the formats themselves. Are there characteristic combinations of store brand names that appear in certain kinds of communities, reflecting common location strategies by firms that seek out the same kind of markets? A final section summarizes the results and their implications for analysts, and for future research.
• The Legal Architecture of Virtual Stores - The focus by many legal commentators and by the authors of mass-market manuals on the intellectual property and payment-systems aspects of Web site design and operation has obscured the fact that for several reasons the sale of goods by means of World Wide Web sites occupies a poorly-charted but rapidly-developing niche of basic commercial law. Not only is the caselaw concerning on-line commerce sparse but the regulatory landscape is generally bare. In July 1997, a much-publicized report prepared by the Federal Government espoused the general principle that "parties should be able to do business with each other on the Internet under whatever terms and conditions they agree upon."
• Customers, Not Products, Are the Chief Commodity of the New Economy by Jeremy Rifkin - The exchange of goods and services through markets gives way to the establishment of long-term commercial relationships inside networks. The commodification of human time and duration becomes more important than the sale of material goods. E-commerce companies are turning information technologies into relationship technologies to create "bonds of intimacy" and "communities of shared interest" with customers. The goal: Make each moment of a client's life a commercial experience. Life itself is becoming a paid-for activity in the form of memberships, subscriptions, leases and retainers, which in turn is transforming traditional social relationships.
• Jeremy Rifkin: The Age of Access - In the industrial economy, with its emphasis on mass production and the sale of goods, securing a share of the market was utmost in the minds of every entrepreneur. In the Age of Access, with its emphasis on selling specialized services and providing access to expertise of all kinds, the role played by suppliers changes markedly. "We are shifting from being box sellers to becoming trusted advisers," said Hewlett-Packard's Wim Roelandts in Don Tapscott's The Digital Economy.
• DTV: The Battle for Consumer Control - This report represents the culmination of AMIıs research and analysis into the area of DTV. This is the final deliverable (a DTV market update report will also be included along with this report) in AMIıs cooperative consulting study entitled "DTV: The Battle for Consumer Control". Included within this document are market projections for DTV-related products (such as digital TVs, set top boxes, PC/TVs, etc.) and DTV-related services (such as ancillary data services, HDTV and SDTV broadcast signals, interactive digital services, etc.).
• The Future of the Mass Audience - In W. Russell Neuman's book, The Future of the Mass Audience, the onset of new technologies within media poses a dilemma to those predicting their impact. Two opposing theories are raised: Orwell's totalitarianistic "Big Brother" theory, which bases its ideas on the Mass Society theory, and Bush's vision of the Memex, which is derived from the theory of communications and political development. However, Neuman assumes that the future of the mass audience must lie somewhere between totalitarianism and a pluralistic democracy. I believe that, despite the advanced technology, the audience of the future will take one of two directions. Depending on the funding of the new media, audiences will either be small and insignificant, or audiences will be controlled by corporate forces.
• The International Political Economic Paradigm Concept as a Marketing Channel Tool - This paper further develops an established marketing theory that can be beneficial to the teaching of international business. A new paradigm is developed for pedagogical purposes. This study considers international marketing historically, and looks into crises which force new paradigms to be considered. The paradigms which should guide development of channel marketing theory must contain both economic and non-economic concepts.
• The Effects of Information Technologies on Commodity Marketing Firms and Strategies - A new word is needed to describe this changing fundamental business relationship. "Conducer" is the new customer emerging from the merger of consumer and producer.
• Doing Business in 2005 - By 2005 consumers globally will have embraced Internet commerce. The virtual commercial "communes" that we see people being members of will support and provide recomendations of trustworthy sellers.
• CNET.com - Special Reports - The Truth About Shopping Online
• Online Buying Takes The Shop Out Of Shopping - In the United States a social and economic phenomenon is starting to influence where people buy their daily necessities and many of their durable goods. Often called online shopping, it is more about online buying.
• The Millennial Mind-Set - Consumer in the 21st century
• Millennium Madness - Online Buying Takes The Shop Out Of Shopping
• Marketing - A Set of Applicable Neural Network Models
• Retailing And Direct Marketing
• Planning and Markets: An Electronic Journal
• Online Retail and Office Space Inventory
• Business Geographics and Micro-merchandising
• Teleshopping
• Changing Market Structure In Six Regional Trade Areas In Ontario
• The Geography of Retailing
• Retail Restructuring: The Example of Factory Outlet Malls
• Superdistribution?
• The Three Waves of Retailing
• Retail Links
• Retail futures

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