SUPPLY CHAIN PARTNERSHIPS FOR PRIVATE-LABEL PRODUCTS: INSIGHTS FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM

Agribusiness,

From consumerism to citizenship: a journey of involvement

The level of interest in sustainability, amongst the general public and within the media, is growing week by week, giving rise to initiatives from numerous stakeholders, public and private, to inform, educate and facilitate behaviour change at the level of individual households – customers and final consumers. In this paper we argue that in order to achieve this behavioural change, the ‘sustainable shopper’ must be targeted in a meaningful and relevant manner and their motivations for purchasing more or less sustainable foods be thoroughly understood in order to maintain the momentum that govt and industry have created in shifting the balance in our lifestyles from consumerism to citizenship. Different groups of shoppers behave in different ways and for different reasons, which has important implications for policy makers, NGOs, food manufacturers and retailers seeking to stimulate a change in purchasing behaviour towards more sustainable foods. In exploring the journey which the sustainable shopper makes, from consumer to citizen, we highlight the importance of ‘involvement’ - of the individual and in the product – in shaping the marketing, merchandising and communication strategies to speed up the journey and ensure more people arrive at the desired destination

Reconstructing systematic persistent impacts of promotional marketing with empirical nonlinear dynamics

An empirical question of long-standing interest is how price promotions affect a brand’s sale shares in the fast-moving consumer-goods market. We investigated this question with concurrent promotions and sales records of specialty beer brands pooled over Tesco stores in the UK. Most brands were continuously promoted, rendering infeasible a conventional approach of establishing impact against an off-promotion sales baseline, and arguing in favor of a dynamics approach. Moreover, promotion/sales records were volatile without easily-discernable regularity. Past work conventionally attributed volatility to the impact of exogenous random shocks on stable markets, and reasoned that promotions have only an ephemeral impact on sales shares in stationary mean-reverting stochastic markets, or a persistent freely-wandering impact in nonstationary markets. We applied new empirical methods from the applied sciences to uncover an overlooked alternative: ‘systematic persistence’ in which promotional impacts evolve systematically in an endogenously-unstable market governed by deterministic-nonlinear dynamics. We reconstructed real-world market dynamics from the Tesco dataset, and detected deterministic-nonlinear market dynamics. We used reconstructed market dynamics to identify a complex network of systematic interactions between promotions and sales shares among competing brands, and quantified/ characterized the dynamics of these interactions. For the majority of weeks in the study, we found that: (1) A brand’s promotions drove down own sales shares (a possibility recognized in the literature), but ‘cannibalized’ sales shares of competing brands (perhaps explaining why brands were promoted despite a negative marginal impact on own sales shares); and (2) Competitive interactions between brands owned by the same multinational brewery differed from those with outside brands. In particular, brands owned by the same brewery enjoyed a ‘mutually-beneficial’ relationship in which an incremental increase in the sales share of one marginally increased the sales share of the other. Alternatively, the sales shares of brands owned by different breweries preyed on each other’s market shares

BEEF PRODUCER ATTITUDES TO COORDINATION AND QUALITY ASSURANCE IN CANADA AND THE UK

Livestock Production/Industries,

Empirically Testing for Dynamic Causality between Promotions and Sales Beer Promotions and Sales in England

We devise a decision tool to help economic researchers select a causal detection method compatible with real-world dynamics of an economic system under investigation. We apply it to test for dynamic causality between promotions and sales of a case-study beer brand in England. We find evidence that promotions and sales data for the brand are generated by a nonlinear deterministic dynamic system. Under these circumstances, conventional Granger Causality detection methods impose unreasonable restrictions on real-world market dynamics, and thus must give way to recently formulated Cross Convergent Mapping (CCM) methods. Our application of CCM methods provides strong evidence that promotions and sales for the brand are bi-causal. Promotions have a long-term impact on sales, and sales have a long-term impact on promotion decisions

Using Supermarket Loyalty Card Data to Inform Better Promotional Strategies

This paper reports the use of loyalty card data from one of the biggest retailers in the world – Tesco - to analyse the impact of promotions. The aim is to demonstrate how such data can bring significant benefits to retailers and manufacturers when deciding promotional strategies, over and above traditional scanner datasets, which the majority of existing research is based around (E.g. Raju, 1992; Macé and Neslin, 2004; and Martínez-Ruiz et al. 2006). Regression analysis is used to compare the effects of different promotional mechanics upon different cuts and tiers of product across the fresh beef category in Tesco; using both scanner data and loyalty card data. The results show that using loyalty card data, which enables us to control for shopper life-stage and region (something which cannot be achieved using scanner data), produces more statistically significant results and provides a more detailed picture of how promotions influence sales

Exploring Supermarket Loyalty Card Analysis to Identify Who Buys Fairtrade

The aim of this paper is to show how supermarket loyalty card data from a panel of over 1.7 million shoppers can be analysed to provide behavioural segmentation insights to profile the fairtrade shopper in order to enhance making targeted marketing decisions. The paper demonstrates the huge marketing potential that loyalty card based shopper segmentation can bring to objectively describe who buys fairtrade products, compared to profiling shoppers with claimed/reported behaviour dataset. A pairedsamples t-test is used to test the degree of appeal of fairtrade tea, coffee, chocolate, drinking chocolates, banana and sugar categories in Tesco to life-stage and lifestyle shopper segments in terms of their retail sales values over 104 weeks. The results show that analysing loyalty cards based on actual behaviour provides a more detailed picture of how specific fairtrade food product categories appeal to the various life-stage and lifestyle shopper segments

Customer categorization, relational justice and SME performance in supermarket supply chains

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of perceived relational justice on the relationship between key customer categorization and performance of small food and drink producers in supermarket supply chains. Design/methodology/approach: Survey data are derived from a sample of (small-scale) suppliers of local and regional food to a large British supermarket. Partial least squares regression analysis was used to test a conceptual framework, which positions relational justice as a mediator in the relationship between key customer categorization and supplier performance, moderated by the length of the relationship. Findings: The findings reveal that small suppliers who perceive their treatment by their key customers as fair tend to achieve higher business performance, which supports the hypothesized mediating role of relational justice on supplier performance. However, this research found no evidence to support the hypothesis that this role is moderated by the length of the relationship between the supplier and buyer. Originality/value: This paper makes a novel empirical contribution, focusing on performance outcomes for small-scale suppliers in a highly competitive environment (fast-moving consumer goods) with customers (supermarkets) who have significant market power. Accordingly, the paper shows that the way supermarket buyers treat their suppliers matters more for the performance of their suppliers than the very fact that they are key customers

Marketing planning and digital customer loyalty data in small business

Purpose – Retailer loyalty card marketing intelligence presents actual customer purchasing preferences, competitor activities and performance. Typically, extant literature implies that larger firms with formal marketing planning approaches will be more able to leverage it, structured as it is within a formalized statistical format. Small business literature on the other hand emphasizes their more informal approach to marketing planning. The purpose of this paper is to consider, for the first time, the potential relationship between retailer loyalty card marketing intelligence and small business market orientation. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual model is developed which diagrammatically interprets how retailer loyalty card marketing intelligence can relate to small business market orientation. Propositions provide a basis for further discussion with applied and research implications. Findings – A pertinent aspect of the conceptualization is the role of small business owner-manager insight and intuition within an experiential learning context. A complementary relationship is posited in the leveraging of retailer loyalty card marketing intelligence to enhance small business market orientation, which with higher levels of entrepreneurship orientation can lead to positive organizational outcomes, such as facilitating more successful and informed engagement with larger suppliers. Originality/value – The paper addresses the increasing pressure small businesses face in dealing with retailer loyalty card marketing intelligence. Generally, literature has yet to adequately address marketing planning implications for firms. The informal/formal tension when considering small businesses presents a particularly interesting area of conceptual development, integrating market orientation literature and also recent developments which point to interaction between market and entrepreneurship orientations. This paper therefore provides a basis for a new small business research agenda in an area which is highly topical and important, with a synthesis of the extant literature in developing a conceptualization and propositions. The conceptualization and propositions can facilitate the development of new research and thinking in this potentially fruitful area of future enquiry