What’s The Category Got to Do With It: Investigation of retailer performance at the category level in the UK market
This thesis replicates and extends the original research (Dhar et al. 2001) into another developed market, the United Kingdom, for a five-year period. It will assess whether the patterns found in the Untied States hold, and identify the conditions where they do not, contributing to the development of more robust understandings of category level performance.
Investigating Price Elasticity for High-Priced Brands
Price elasticity is a widely used measure of consumers’ willingness or ability to pay for goods and services. This research examines the price elasticity of high-priced brands. We define high-priced brands as those that sell at or above the price point at which consumers begin to consider that product to be luxurious or premium in the category (Kapferer et al., 2014; Sjostrom et al., 2016). More specifically, we use high-priced wine brands as the context for this research. Wine is an ideal product to use because it has a wide price range, and can be purchased for various consumption situations. When prices are high we anticipate that elasticities may no longer function as they do in everyday consumer packaged goods markets. Instead, they might become smaller or possibly even positive if consumers are prepared to pay for the quality they desire. We employ stated choice experiments to investigate how Situational Factors, Consumer Factors and Contextual Factors influence price elasticities for high- priced wine brands in Australia. Results are that price elasticity estimates for the high-priced brands in this study are −1.8 on average. This is lower than the commonly reported figure of −2.6 for brands in general; however, in one part of the experiment respondents chose for a ‘high-importance’ occasion. Smaller price elasticities were found when (1) the perceived importance of the consumption situation was high, (2) among regular high-priced wine buyers, and (3) among brands with a higher initial price position. These results demonstrate that the patterns of price elasticity for high-priced products are mainly similar to that for other FMCG products, but consumers are slightly less responsive.
Can Nudging Principles Encourage Behaviours Associated with Obesity Prevention?
To reduce the incidence of overweight and obesity, consumers need to engage in obesity prevention behaviours, such as consuming a healthy diet and exercising regularly. However engagement, or lack of engagement, in these behaviours is often habitual and thus difficult to change. A limitation of most current health behaviour change approaches is an assumption that consumers are rational and think consciously about all of their decisions. In contrast, the social marketing discipline acknowledges the habitual nature of heath behaviours, and incorporates various strategies from marketing and other disciplines that can be useful for promoting positive health behaviour change, such as ‘nudging’. A lot is still unknown about the efficacy of using nudging in different contexts. This thesis comprises three studies that investigate the efficacy of nudging for influencing obesity prevention behaviours.
Shopping…with Children: Investigating in-store shopping behaviour of adults accompanied by children
This thesis contributes new knowledge to the understanding of influences on shopper behaviour. In particular, it shapes knowledge about the level of influence children have over parents while in-store, on a number of levels. In addition to giving new benchmarks for behaviour in Australia, it provides the first account of the way shopping with children shapes the way adult shoppers use different parts of the store, and the rate at which adult shoppers shop.
Management of retail channel partners by FMCG manufacturers
There have been substantial changes within the retail industry, including continuing retail concentration toward only a few, large retail chains and the emergence of private labels (PLs) competing with national brands (NBs). These changes have led to a shift in power toward those chains at the expense of manufacturers of fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs), and reduced levels of cooperation between channel members. New approaches, such as Category Management (CM) and other aspects of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR), have been introduced to favor both manufacturers and retailers. However, such strategies frequently fail because retailers and manufacturers often do not cooperate closely.
How online shoppers behave
An observational study was undertaken to study shoppers conducting an online shop from two large supermarket retailers with varied online shopping interfaces. The shoppers’ task was to purchase one item from each of the 12 product categories. Their shops were videoed and the resultant video was coded to document key patterns including selection times across categories, pages viewed, locations of selected items and the usage of various display settings. A post-shop questionnaire captured demographic information allowing comparisons between differing shopper profiles; while comparisons between retailers were made to determine if online shopping interfaces impact shopper behaviour.
Evaluating Retailer Price Promotions – The Effects of Category-Wide Promotional Activity on Unit Sales
In retail markets, such as grocery, price promotions are currently a part of every manufacturer and retailer’s strategy. While many studies consider price promotion impact from a manufacturer point of view, only a few studies look at the category- wide impact of price promotions on retailers’ sales (e.g., Ailawadi et al. 2006). This study extends the latter stream and looks at what happens when a retailer increases its overall extent of promotion activity. The research is important because a retailer’s success is linked to all brands in a category, not just a select few.
The impact of packaging elements on consumers’ unconscious emotions
This research represents one of the first studies to investigate customers’ affective response to different images, colours and fonts on a package using physiological measures. The research reveals that affect exists as an important dimension in consumers’ responses to packaging design. It also demonstrates the distinction between two sets of results obtained by physiological measurements and self-report methods. This distinction suggests that consumers’ unconscious emotional response is measured differently by physiological devices as opposed to typical self-report methods. Self-report methods show a conscious response to changing colours, images, and fonts, while measurement of the unconscious responses show only a response to image. However, unconscious measures showed an interaction between some of the elements, but the self-report measures did not.
Understanding consumer knowledge about private labels
This thesis examines the nature and content of knowledge about supermarket private labels in consumer memory. It investigates the patterns in perceptual responses, the organisation of private label knowledge and the levels and underlying reasons for consumers rejecting private labels.
A comparison of on-line and in-store customer behaviour in wine retailing
This thesis provides a starting point in determining how existing retail knowledge can be adapted to the Internet by comparing aspects of customer behaviour on and off-line. The advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) signified global opportunities for members and stakeholders of the wine industry. Wine retailers have been quick to trial the on-line format and their trials have been met with varying degrees of success. Wine producers have also seized opportunities to promote and sell their products via the Internet. In recent years tax incentives have been introduced to encourage wine producers to sell directly to the consumer, with most wine producers being located in rural areas the Internet offers an opportunity to bring customers closer to wine products. This thesis utilises data collected through a customer database and via surveys customer behaviour has been compared.
