Innovation in the Book Market Retail. Preferences Among Romanian Readers

Today’s dynamic business environment forces companies to differentiate more than ever and focus on gaining long-term competitive advantages through innovation. The book market faces new challenges, mainly related to the shifting behaviour of readers. Innovation might be perceived as a path towards differentiation, attaining competitive advantage, and market success. Understanding the preferences of the readers and knowing the retail innovation trends could help all the decision-making actors of the book market adapt better to the dynamics of contemporary society and the business environment. The present paper aims at identifying the preferences of Romanian readers regarding the innovations employed in the book market retail.  To gather the data, we applied an online questionnaire to a sample of 486 respondents from Romania. The main conclusion of the study underlines that the consumers are not necessarily sensitive to technological innovation or an innovative format of the stores but are highly sensitive to the atmosphere in the bookstores and to the special offers of the bookstores

PERCEPTION AND COMMUNICATION OF INNOVATION IN RETAIL TRADE (CASE STUDY APPLIED TO BRICOLAGE PRODUCTS)

Starting from the specific features of bricolage retail trade (which is part of the ‘Do It Yourself’ – DYI commercial format), this study aims to clarify the concept and structure of innovation in this field, and to present how innovation is perceived and communicated by sellers to customers. The initial literature review is followed by the design of a three-stage research, which consists of a variety of methods, techniques and tools of selective market research. The objectives are to establish the main forms of innovation in DIY trade, the perception and communication of innovation to the customer, and the internal marketing techniques which could deliver higher marketing advantages to the seller. This paper covers only the results of a pilot research conducted via qualitative exploratory research among 13 managers of the bricolage stores in Bucharest. Five hypotheses were tested and confirmed through research. All premises are ready for the scientific construction of research tools for the second and third stages of the study