A Review of Consumer-Facing Digital Technologies Across Different Types of Fashion Store Formats

Several current trends in the fashion retail and marketing landscape are associated with the ongoing digital revolution, including the increasing tendency for fashion retailers to adopt consumer-facing digital technologies across their online and physical store formats. Such technology helps improve the store environment by conferring a more engaging and stimulating shopping experience for consumers. This chapter provides a review of existing literature, supported by relevant industry reports and current examples from key players in the fashion retail sector, to provide a comprehensive analysis of different types of consumer-facing digital technology in various fashion store formats and how they impact on the overall shopping experience. The authors review a number of technologies including interactive touchscreens, RFID tags, beacon technology, magic mirrors and mobile apps, and consider how they are implemented in online stores, digitally enhanced stores, brand stores and pop-up stores in the fashion sector

Toward a three-dimensional framework for omni-channel

The omni-channel, as an emerging trend in retail, aims to coordinate processes and technologies across supply and sales channels. The evolution of this concept is still nascent. This paper develops a conceptual framework for omni-channel systems, configured by three dimensions of channel stage, channel type and channel agent. Integration and visibility are also explored and discussed as the main enablers, which support the implementation of omni-channel framework. This research is built upon the empirical and secondary data. Multiple case studies and expert interview methods are employed for data collection to validate the recommended framework and to explore its applicability. The framework proposed, along with the key integration and visibility enablers identified for the omni-channel, can be applied to a wide range of retail supply chains. It helps managers to develop, run and monitor omni-channel systems; it may also serve as a stepping-stone for development of the literature on omni-channel systems

Power, Policy, and Digital Switchover: An Analysis of Communication Policy Making and its Challenges for Regulating Ghana’s Digital Television Sector

This thesis examines communication policy making in Ghana during the country’s digital switchover process launched in 2010. The thesis argues that Ghana’s digital switchover policy making process was an opportunity to refashion policy and regulatory structures towards the public interest that went beyond the modernisation of broadcasting transmission infrastructure and the innovations digital switchover brought. The thesis investigates whether, and the extent to which, structural and institutional characteristics in the communication policy arena facilitated or hindered broadcasting policy making, and explains the persistence of the analogue era broadcasting regulatory regime in the digital multichannel television market. Ghana’s return to Constitutional rule since 1992 led to the liberalisation of the broadcasting sector, permitting private ownership of broadcast media for the first time in the country’s history, as well as the reconfiguration of the communication policy making arena (and the wider policy environment), with more actors engaged in policy making. Yet, the manner in which this was achieved sustained the capability of state policy actors in the communication sector to influence the shape, pace and direction of policy due to the concentration of power within the Executive that granted the government excessive power. The thesis draws on political science and sociological concepts and approaches to analyse original qualitative data based on extensive documentary analysis and elite interviews with policy actors, during Ghana’s digital switchover policy making process from 2010. The study finds that political events during Ghana’s transition to Constitutional rule in the early 1990s, after ten years of military autocratic rule was the critical juncture that laid the foundation for a path-dependent communication policy making trajectory. Overtime this has produced a fractured and uncoordinated broadcasting policy making context whereby policy makers act without much consideration for the wider interest of the sector, whilst non-state policy actors remain ineffective to sustain advocacy that would serve the public interest. This played out during Ghana’s digital switchover process as the dominance of state-controlled policy actors ensured the framing of domestic digital switchover policy objectives along narrow externally set priorities at the expense of longstanding and pertinent broadcasting policy and regulatory concerns that could have been part of the country’s digital switchover policy making agenda. The study maintains that as the full implications of the digital switchover process on Ghana’s broadcasting sector becomes apparent, the continued lack of an adequate policy and regulatory framework for the new digital television broadcasting market, and, indeed the larger broadcasting sector, does not serve the public interest and as such, it impoverishes the broadcasting service available to citizens

Your window-on-the-world: interactive television, the BBC and the second shift aesthetics of public service broadcasting

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one

Journalism in Digital Native Media: Beyond Technological Determinism

This article reflects on the conceptualisation and practise of journalism in European digital native media. The way news is produced and consumed in the digital era knocks down the boundaries that once divided professionals, citizens, and activists. At the same time, significant changes highlighted in recent studies call for a new theoretical and practical approach that goes beyond the dominant perspective of technological determinism. In relation with previous research, we have selected innovative digital media platforms (De Correspondent, Heidi.news, Eldiario.es, IlPost, Mediapart, and Observador), and we have analysed the types of journalism they set out to produce, as gleaned from their public-facing communications and interviews with the platforms’ founders and editors, comparing their stated goals with the journalism they produce and, lastly, we commented on changes in journalism. Digital native media explore renewed fields for journalism. The present analysis allows identifying the emergence of a series of trends in digital native media, which show a coexistence of traditional and new principles. Beyond the technological impact, the new media respond to the needs of society by incorporating the citizen as a reason for its purpose and as a collaborator in production processes. On the other hand, new players and an updated role of journalists come into play with innovative proposals designed for the current multiplatform and mobile scenario

Developing a theoretical framework of consumer logistics from a comprehensive literature review

Paper delivered at the 21st Logistics Research Network annual conference 2016, 7th-9th September 2016, Hull. Abstract Purpose: Logistics as a business discipline entered academic consciousness in the mid-1960s when work by marketing academics discussed the integration between marketing and logistics. However, the link with consumers in the point-of-origin to point-of-consumption typology was not explored until Granzin and Bahn’s conceptualisation and model of consumer logistics (CL) in 1989. Since then few contributions have followed and neglecting this aspect of logistics research is difficult to understand. Firstly, the consumer represents a productive resource as an important downstream supply chain member carrying out logistics activities and tasks. Secondly, logistics activities directed towards the consumer also act along a marketing axis, i.e. satisfaction and loyalty for an overall shopping experience both from transaction-specific and cumulative levels are influenced by product quality elements and service-related dimensions. This paper presents a theoretical framework for deeper research into the topic of CL. Research approach: A literature review was conducted first following philosophical or field conceptualization principles as a first step towards theory building. Data bases of major logistics and SCM journals were searched however the publication timeframe was not limited as the concept of CL is relatively new. Selection criteria and Boolean searches were conducted and keywords used within article abstracts and title fields of search. Due to a relative scarcity of contributions obtained by that approach and in-line with the principle of methodological triangulation, additional search strategies were applied using Google/ Google Scholar searches. The majority of the cited contributions were also cross-referenced and included in the analysis if appropriate. Findings and originality: The literature search yielded a mother population of 46 documents of which 24 have been considered relevant for further consideration. The document harvest was analysed using Granzin and Bahn’s original CL issues and additional features in order to explore, structure, articulate, orient, hierarchize and delimit the field of CL in the 21st century. Research impact: This paper updates Granzin and Bahn’s work to outline new and distinctive features of CL given the obvious changes in the retail landscape since their work 27 years ago, such as the Internet and omni-channel retailing. More broadly, conceptualizing CL in a holistic manner enhances SCM theory building by questioning traditional notions of time and space ranges, isolated marketing-merchandizing/logistics considerations, traditional understandings of sites /locations, and equipment (e.g. shopping cart or basket)/ infrastructure/ layout and buying stages that are in-line with external evolutions on organizational, technological and societal levels. Practical impact: Understanding and improving CL contributes to supply chain competitiveness via increased consumer satisfaction and loyalty, better order fulfilment via cost reductions and efficiency increases, and enhanced differentiation targeting consumers receptive for sustainability/ ethics/ mobility/ lifestyle/ life quality issues. A dedicated approach to CL also enhances management of repercussions and interactions with upstream/ B2B logistics, visible through retail stores being both a destination and a source for inventory, the rise of drop-ship vendor relationships and new fulfilment options and related infrastructure