Bricks-and-mortar retailing requires footfall – otherwise known as ‘front traffic’ – to be viable. Footfall is the number of people who pass a store in a given time frame. A retailer’s ability to ‘stop’ this footfall and attract people into their store, converting passers-by into shoppers, is a measure of retailing effectiveness, known as the store entry ratio. Both shoppers and buyers are imperative for a retailer to be economically viable; passing footfall is essentially worthless if potential customers are not entering and purchasing. This research is a replication and extension of Graham, Kahn, and Illya's (2017) study that directly investigated footfall’s effect on retailers within certain categories, creating a generalisable relationship between footfall, shoppers, and buyers. The broad objective of this thesis is to replicate and investigate if the patterns found in Graham et al.’s (2017) work are generalisable across other categories, locations, brands, and stores.
How do disruptions to physical and mental availability of brands affect consumer behaviour?
Various research studies show that brands with high physical and mental availability have high market shares (Sharp, 2010a, Ehrenberg et al., 1997, Farris et al., 1989). Changes in these two factors are very likely to affect consumer brand choices and the subsequent market shares of those brands. Understanding how and under what conditions changes in mental and physical availability affect consumer brand buying is crucial, and therefore, the focus of this thesis.
Building upon the study by Bronnenberg et al. (2012), this thesis examines international migrants’ purchase behaviour (i.e. how their brand buying changes once they move countries) in comparison to locals’ purchasing behaviour. As migrants settle into their new homes, they can no longer shop at their previous grocery stores. Therefore, migrants have greater access to various new brands, and less access to foreign brands they were once accustomed to purchasing. Thus, the expectation is that migrants to any new market will start to buy these brands and look like local shoppers (see Stocchi et al., 2017). However, due to migrants’ prior long-term exposure to the brands they historically purchased (i.e. foreign brands), migrants may purchase the brands that are still mentally available to them and devote less of their purchases to the unfamiliar brands (i.e. domestic brands) in their new location – at least at first. It is not known for how long or how strongly these effects last. This natural experiment allows us to further understand how changes to physical and mental availability influence consumer brand buying patterns.
What’s in your basket? Documenting fundamental buying patterns across shopping baskets
This thesis examines shopper behaviour patterns using shopping baskets as the unit of analysis. A shopping basket is a set of items purchased together on a single occasion, regardless of the number of items purchased, or method of collecting them in-store (e.g. shopping trolley, basket or hand-carry). It investigates three shopping basket patterns: 1) basket size patterns and how they relate to retailer performance measures; 2) the different categories that are purchased in small and large baskets; and 3) the usefulness of an untested basket-level metric (basket penetration) to monitor retailer category performance.
Basket analysis is an important research focus, as it provides a unique view of shopper behaviour that can better inform marketers about how to manage and grow their brands.
An investigation of the validity of virtual reality for shopper research
A computer-generated ‘virtual’ simulation of a real store is an innovative research method that requires further validation to support its use in marketing. This research investigates how accurately consumers’ usual brand and product choices are captured in virtual reality (VR) simulations of familiar retail environments. It also investigates how the fielding mode and protocols of VR studies affect the validity of results.
Let’s get physical! Expanding marketing science to physical activity behaviour
Public health researchers and practitioners try to understand how people allocate finite time across various activities (including physical activity). Similarly, marketers seek to understand how people spend their limited money across different products. Marketing science has identified generalizable patterns of buying behaviours (empirical generalisations/laws) that inform brand growth strategies. As physical activity is a repeat- behaviour, like buying goods and services, this thesis aims to suggest ways to promote physical activity through the application of marketing science knowledge to physical activity data.
Investigating the cross-category purchasing between brand extensions
Brand extensions occur when a brand launches a product in a different product category and is a way of capitalising upon successful brand names. Several studies have shown that users of a brand express intentions to purchase extensions at a higher rate than non-users. The problem with these results, however, is they have been developed using attitudinal measures, rather than behavioural ones. This thesis intends to bridge this literature gap by using behavioural data to analyse whether the buyers of a brand in one category purchase extensions at a higher rate than non-brand buyers.
A previous study by Mundt (2011) had a similar purpose, however the study held limitations, such as categorising brands by their corporate brand and category pairings analysed being the same category. This thesis aims to replicate and extend this study to increase the understanding and generalisability of these findings.
As brand extensions are said to positively impact choice of the brand, this thesis aims to understand whether this occurs in market.
A two-dimensional typology of packaging elements to explore the packaging localisation of western brands in non-western markets
As cultural and language differences exist between Western and non-Western countries, in this respect, when Western brands are sold in the non-Western markets, marketers tend to modify the product packaging to achieve the desired communication outcomes.
Yet, while extensive studies have shown that localising elements (e.g., colour or pictorial cues) on packaging has a strong impact on consumer response in the non- Western markets, they have provided only fragmented views of this phenomenon. On the basis of literature review, two major knowledge gaps were identified. First, existing studies primarily looked at individual packaging elements. Second, these studies primarily focused on measuring the effects of packaging elements on consumer behaviour and well-established individual differences as moderating factors were overlooked.
Two studies in this thesis were conducted to provide systematic insights into the influence of packaging localisation of Western brands in non-Western markets.
The impact of shelf space on brand choice
National brands and store brands face fierce competition in terms of shelf space. Recent decades have witnessed store brands occupying more and more shelf space in a great number of supermarkets at the expense of national brands. Shelf space is a powerful tool for retailers to compete with manufacturers. However, while the impact of shelf space on consumer choice of national brands has been studied, very little is known about the influence of shelf space on the choice of store brands.
This study addresses the question; should retailers use shelf space as a tool to gain more sales for their private labels?
Sales effectiveness of supermarket endcaps: Does location matter?
Previous research has shown that endcaps – special displays located at either end of the gondola rows in a supermarket – are effective at increasing sales level. They have claimed that endcaps were able to increase sales levels from 23% to an overwhelming 1,197%. None of these studies have attempted to understand how different locations of endcaps affect sales uplift. They have not isolated and identified whether the sales uplifts were generated from the endcap shelf or from the in-aisle shelf, or a combination of the two. These findings offer important insights into how endcap promotions affect shopper behaviour, expanding researchers’ and practitioners’ knowledge of the effectiveness of such an important marketing tool.
The Power of the Endcap. Use of Endcaps by Retailers/Manufacturers & Shoppers
Endcaps are displays for products located at the end of an aisle or row of shelving in a supermarket or retail store. Endcaps are considered a valuable form of in-store media for manufacturers and retailers because of their ability to prompt sales increases and high prevalence relative to other forms of in-store media).
The aim of this thesis is to lay a foundation for a better understanding of the current endcap practices and shopper behaviours associated with endcap displays and purchases in Australian supermarkets.
