“A glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tantalizing air of clever new things”. Selfridges? Abercrombie & Fitch? No – Henry James describing a WHSmith railway bookstall in 1888. Today a good bookshop still provides a focal point for its community, a peaceful haven to while away spare hours, and a stimulating environment in which to buy gifts (surely nothing is more tightly targeted to its recipient than a well chosen book) or a modest self-indulgence.

But this centuries old form of retailing is under considerable threat. In most countries the market is shrinking. In the UK its value in real terms has fallen 6% since 2004, although, thanks to fierce discounting, the volume sold has increased 10%. In all territories traditional bookshops, both chains and independents, are finding themselves being squeezed between internet retailers and cherry-picking discounters, such as supermarkets. And if that isn’t enough there is the emerging threat of e-books and the piracy that will inevitably accompany the growth of that market.

Independent bookselling has been decimated. In 1995 The American Booksellers Association boasted 5,500 members[1]; ten years later there were just 1,700[2]. Chain booksellers are also having a tough time. US market leader Barnes & Noble reported a comparable store sales decline of 5.4% in 2008; CEO Steve Riggio commented that “2008 proved to be the most challenging year that the company and the industry have ever experienced”[3]. Meanwhile number two chain Borders lost $187m in 2008/9[4]. Such is the magnitude of its financial problems, there has been speculation that it might be swallowed up by Barnes & Noble creating an enterprise with 30% of the US market[5]. In several other countries such consolidation has already led to one or two dominant chains: Waterstone’s in Britain, Thalia and DBH Buch Handels in Germany, and Indigo in Canada.

Borders UK closed in the run-up to Christmas, leaving Waterstone’s as “the last man standing” among generalist, well-ranged UK chain booksellers. But Waterstone’s continues to struggle in a market where more than half of all books are sold at a discount[6]; despite the benefits of its 2006 acquisition of Ottakar’s, recent like-for-like sales were 8.5% down on the previous year[7]. In Germany DBH Buch Handels, owners of Weltbild, Hugendubel and 44 book sections in Karstadt department stores has announced 600 redundancies[8]. It forms an effective duopoly with Thalia[9]; together the two businesses account for half the market. In Canada Indigo has fared better than most of its international peers, with roughly flat sales and EBITDA[10].

Borders sold its Australasian, Singapore and UK & Ireland businesses in 2007, leaving Fnac as the only significant multinational bookseller[11]. But although a bedrock of its heavyweight cultural formula – which other company would offer quotations from Molière while you are waiting for the annual report to download – books account for less than 20% of Fnac’s sales; consumer electronics is more than half the business. Its 81 French stores account for 71% of sales, and it has a further 63 stores across Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Brazil and Greece[12]. The international stores closely follow the French formula – which probably explains why Fnac didn’t succeed in Germany and Taiwan. The company disguises its orthodox corporate ownership (it is owned by PPR Group) well, exhibiting a campaigning zeal to bring culture to the masses at low prices. In France and Spain book discounts are constrained by regulation to just 5%, but elsewhere are more aggressive.

Fnac has, together with Barnes & Noble and Brazil’s Livraria Cultura, been one of the most successful traditional book retailers in building an online business; fnac.com accounts for some 10% of its annual sales of €4.6bn, successfully seeing off Amazon’s attempts to exert its usual domination in the French online market. Elsewhere Amazon prevails, with a 43% share of the online channel in the US[13], and has been vilified for its tough negotiating tactics with publishers. Indeed some analysts now view Amazon as the overall US book market leader[14].

Amazon is the prime source of innovation in the industry; in recent months it has launched Encore, a service that uses information from consumer reviews to identify titles which were largely overlooked when first published[15], and a self-publishing service, CreateSpace[16]. It has bought print-on-demand firm BookSurge, audio books company Audible.com, used books retailer AbeBooks[17], the owner of i-Phone e-book app Stanza, and social networking site Shelfari[18]. Traditional booksellers have been slow to respond to web-based innovators, although Barnes & Noble launched “My B&N”, its own answer to Shelfari late last year[19].

Fnac’s rather po-faced commitment to highbrow culture is in contrast to most other chain booksellers, who are often accused of having sold out to the mainstream. Cultural and educational commentators worry about the “dumbing down” of discount obsessed, bestseller driven markets. Heritage Canada, a Federal Government agency, expressed concern last year at the prospect of a market where “purchases are more informed by price and less by … literary or artistic merit”[20].

E-books is currently a small part of the market. UK Digital sales in 2008 rose 27% to £80m, still less than 3% of the total book market. But most of those sales were digital content in the academic/professional sector; e-book sales to consumers represented just 0.01% of the total book market. In the US, however, perhaps stimulated by Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, e-books accounted for 1.5% of the total[21].

So what must traditional bookshops do to remain relevant? Having ceded first mover advantage to Amazon on online bookselling they can ill afford to do so again with e-books. Amazon’s Kindle sets the benchmark in this embryonic market, but Waterstone’s moved early to tie-up a deal with Sony, and last March Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise, a leader in the e-book market and plans to launch an e-bookstore later this year.

Successful physical stores will need a well-integrated multi-channel operation.  Small shops with well-read but friendly booksellers and carefully tailored ranges to meet the needs of a local community (the better independents do this really well) can prosper. At the other extreme larger destination stores cannot differentiate themselves from Amazon on range, but must do so on experience. Such stores need a spectacular building, sumptuous displays, reasons to linger (Waterstone’s fifth floor bar in its Piccadilly store and Livraria Cultura’s “philisophical cafés” are good examples), numerous author readings and events, and real subject experts as booksellers.

“Hard Times” indeed. But if they don’t adapt, bricks-and-mortar bookstores risk becoming “The Old Curiosity Shop”.

[2] Norwich Bulletin, 14.8.08

[3] Barnes & Noble Inc 2008 results

[4] Publishers Weekly, 22.5.09

[5] New York Times magazine, 14.9.08

[6] The Bookseller, 11.3.08

[7] HMV Group interim management statement, 14.1.10

[8] The Bookseller, 30.6.09

[9] The Bookseller, 11.3.09, quoting from Buchreport 2008

[10] Indigo Annual Report 2009

[11] Japanese chain Kinokuniya operates in 8 countries outside Japan, but specialises in Japanese language books

[12] Fnac.com, accessed 20.6.09

[13] Time magazine, 22.6.09

[14] http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm, accessed 20.6.09

[15] http://www.internetretailing.net/news/amazon-uses-customer-reviews-to-relaunch-missed-products, accessed 20.6.09

[16] Time magazine, 22.6.09

[17] Time magazine, 22.6.09

[18] New York Times magazine, 14.9.08

[19] Publishers Weekly, 27.10.08

[20] “The Book Retail Sector in Canada”, Heritage Canada (The Bookseller, 19.2.08)

[21] PA Yearbook 2008 (The Bookseller, 27 April 2009)

I begin with Tesco. They deliver to my area – and to most households in the UK from remote areas of Scotland to the Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall. I have a Tesco Clubcard that I haven’t used regularly since four house moves failed every time to make Tesco my nearest or most convenient store. This seems remarkable given that Tesco has over 2,000 stores – more than Sainsbury, Asda/Wal-Mart and Morrisons stores added together.

Though I hadn’t bought from tesco.com for two years, they welcome me back by name – just as Uncle Sam would have done. I choose a delivery slot first. I live on a street with limited access and vehicles are only allowed at certain times. That’s fine. Tesco have the slot for the next day and will reserve it for two hours while I make my selection. They have a variety of delivery costs from to £3.75 to £6.25, irrespective of spend and whether  based on popularity of slot, delivery area or driver shifts is not clear. My delivery slot cost £4.50.

They don’t sell my favourite toilet tissue. How can that be? I select something else and have to select substitutes for a few other favourite items too. I notice they do an organic vegetable box from a British farmer… interesting. The contents are changed every week and include a newsletter giving ‘practical storage advice, tasty recipe suggestions and news from the farm’. But it’s not a local farm and so I dismiss it.

I use some Tesco Clubcard money-off vouchers that I have kept for ages. Too long for one voucher, and it’s out of date. I understand why they have to have an expiry date and at two years, it probably suits most shoppers. Still, I wonder if they would re-issue it, since the points have been ‘earned’. Unfortunately I don’t seem able to do that, and feel I have lost out. I get the choice of delivery with or without carrier bags, with extra points (if I use them quickly enough) for not using bags. Our address is a little difficult to find and I want to add a note to that effect but can’t figure out how to do it.

Overall, it’s fairly painless but maybe a bit more involved than I would like. I’ve probably spent less than I would in store but I could also be tempted (by the vegetable box, for example) and take advantage of special offers in just the same way as I might in a traditional store environment. I only had to wait for the order to arrive… and it did – on time, without substitutions and with reasonable ‘best before’ dates. They give me a voucher for 5p per litre off a tank of petrol. I am happy.

Sainsbury’s delivery cost varies between £3.50 and £6.50, and my choice of slot is £3.50. I feel comfortable at Sainsbury. They have everything I want including some fairly odd items and they are all delivered with no substitutions. They even highlight the one pack of mushrooms that has less than four days until its ‘use by’ date, and all other fresh items have four days or more. I get another 5p per litre off fuel. Very useful.

For the next shop I choose Asda. Asda, because of their strategy on loyalty marketing, don’t know anything about me although I have had periods of shopping in store. However, they confirm that they deliver to my area and it’s easy to fill in the details. My chosen slot is £4.50 – the same as Tesco.

Like Tesco, Asda do not stock my favourite toilet tissue. I didn’t even know I had a favourite toilet tissue until now, or how dependent I had become on the choice available in my usual Sainsbury store. There are a few other items where I have to make substitutions too and some where I can’t find anything suitable at all. The search prefers me to use precise brand names and is intolerant of my vague attempts at product descriptions. However, the aisles are easy to navigate. Once again I find I am able to make impulse buys and take advantage of special offers in a way that simply wasn’t possible in the early days of online grocery shopping. They promise that they will never charge more for an item substituted, even if it costs more.

Asda are late, and they don’t phone. They are only late by ten minutes, although if it had been Sainsbury’s, I would have received £10 and so I imagine that would be less likely to happen. They had made one substitution, and I got the choice of whether to accept or not. It all seemed cheaper but maybe that’s just an impression. After all, the price comparisons between the top UK grocers are complicated for the shopper, with all retailers claiming to be the cheapest in some way – baskets, real baskets, numbers of products, numbers of changes, percentage of changes…

In 2008, Waitrose were voted best high-street retailer by Which? And so I wanted to see if they performed online just as well. A quick check at Waitrose.com confirms that they deliver to my area, but only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Delivery charges are £5 to deliver, £3 to collect from a store, with a minimum order £50. Waitrose is the only supermarket that began their online excursion by using a third-party, Ocado. The John Lewis Partnership signed over its stake in Ocado to the JLP pension fund in 2008 and Waitrose now compete with Ocado. I like Waitrose. They have the right toilet tissue and they deliver in different coloured bags that separate freezer, fridge and cupboard items. They have made a couple of substitutions, and they are also in separate bags to make it easy to refuse them. I don’t.

Next, I intend to try Ocado. Unlike Waitrose, they have variable delivery charges from free to £5 (advanced booking is free or cheaper) and delivery every day but Sunday. They also have one hour slots with half-hour overlaps, so it’s easier to choose a slot that suits. They display the times that the delivery vans are in the area. Although the charge is the same, it’s a greener option.

I have registered but now I’m bored with my little study and I don’t order. All the online grocers in the UK satisfy my needs. They all do the basics and then have additional features that I like, and they are constantly monitoring each other to stay in line. Although I may have more substitutes from one online grocer one week, the situation can be reversed the next, and they are all much better than they used to be.

Now I sit back and wait for the reaction to my apparent sudden lack of interest in online grocery shopping, and the offers soon start pouring in. Asda were the first to respond, offering free delivery on my next order on the day my first order was delivered. And later they send a request to join their consumer panel. But they quickly tire of my lack of response. Two weeks after my Sainsbury’s shop, Sainsubury’s send a £5 e-voucher, and continue to offer further discounts as the weeks pass. For Tesco, it’s as if I had never existed. Ocado and Waitrose are the most persistent with emailed and posted communication every week and I am finally persuaded by the ‘Tesco match’ promise. I go to Ocado.com, the only pure-play grocer, with my latest £15 voucher.

There is a ‘green’ option of choosing not to make any alterations to the order, which appeals but of course as soon as I have checked-out I think of additions that I cannot now add. All the online grocers have green statements and eco-friendly policies on such topics as plastic bags and delivery van emissions but Ocado really try to grab the green customer with ‘green’ slots that show when a delivery is already being made in your area, eco-friendly vans which, they claim, keep 40 cars off the road every day, closed loop recycling for their plastic bags, and the advantage of a low-emission distribution centre over order-picking in-store. In recognition of their green contribution, Ocado were given an Online Green Award (OLGA) in 2008 by IMRG, beating nominees eBay and Marks & Spencer.

When they deliver, on-time and without substitutions, for the first time I feel like a new customer and get special treatment. I get an explanatory leaflet and a free daily paper. There is the promise of a small gift with my next order.

It is remarkable that in the UK I have such a choice of online grocers, and although I live in the populous south east, it’s a service available to almost every household. Ocado are the only online grocers to use a custom-built warehouse, while the others continue picking in store. One of the big four UK grocers is notable for its absence in online delivery -Morrisons. There is also much more than grocery shopping to be done at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose – though not Ocado, who are specialist grocery. There are diets and contact lenses, pet insurance, furniture, recipes, competitor price comparisons, electronics, ‘green’ tips, community projects, special interest clubs, – all over and above the separate wine and flowers offers.

While I wonder about who to settle with, I continue to receive plenty of offers in an attempt to grab my loyalty. There seems very little in the way of barriers to switching between online grocers now that navigation, speed and payment systems are so slick. They have had plenty of practice at getting the service right since their experiments with online grocery in the mid to late 1990s. Ocado’s attempt at providing a barrier is a yearly subscription charge that gives free delivery no matter how many times you order (providing orders are over £40). At first, they offer membership for half the usual price of £99.99 per year, and then a free two-week trial. Almost immediately, Waitrose become the first online grocer to offer free delivery on orders over £50. Next, Ocado offer Waitrose own-label for less than Waitrose offer in-store or online. And Ocado then send me an email when it is voted Which? Magazine’s best online supermarket – just ahead of second-placed Waitrose. There’s quite a battle ensuing and I wouldn’t like to try and predict a winner – unless it’s the consumer. And to be quite honest, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to trail around a supermarket on a weekly basis any more.

The combination of these two developments can be seen in the growth of genuinely location-based applications.We can consider contemporary LBS services across two broad dimensions: the extent to which they are personal or social applications and whether they are push or pull in orientation. Applications such as physical asset or information tracking tend to be user-initiated, whilst geographically targeted incentives (such as proximity promotions), or applications such as child location or congestion alerts are pushed to the user. On the other axis, we can distinguish between personal productivity tools such as local train departure information, as against social apps (such as who is tweeting nearby? or where are my friends?) Each type of application offers different opportunities for marketers, although whilst clearly push-based apps are more attractive for market targeting purposes, the reality is that users may prefer to retain control of the interaction.

Matrix of location-based mobile services

Branded pull-based personal apps range include that launched in March 2009 by UK discount hotelier Travelodge, which provides a simple interface to allow the user to find, price, and book the nearest Travelodge to their location. Similarly, Tesco Finder provides an on-request shelf lookup and pricing service for individual items in the user’s nearest store (‘Sausage rolls are in aisle 2, 8 units along and 2 shelves up. And by the way, we’re offering any two for £1.50’). Push-based personal apps rely on responding to profile or stored alert information in a proactive way. Zillow’s Real Estate app will push-notify you of new property for sale near your current location. Aloqua is a mobile search engine which proactively notifies the user of interesting places, events and Facebook friends near you (www.aloqa.com). The user can select ‘channels’ (such as pizza outlets, movies, concerts and medical facilities) and determine the extent of ‘proactive notification’ of particular events, such as a voucher available in the area, to a child leaving a safety zone.

Social apps, on the other hand, are reliant on network effects to create sufficient critical mass to be useful to both users and to marketers. Social apps with push-based capabilities include Centrl, (www.centrl.com), Brightkite (www.brightkite.com), Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) and Google Latitude (www.google.com/latitude). Most will notify the user of friends in the vicinity. For example, Foursquare allows the user to ‘check-in’ wherever they are and will tell the user’s friends where they can find them and recommend places to go & things to do. But services such as Centrl offers to push money-saving offers to them too.

Whilst social apps are less well developed than personal apps and push apps less than pull apps, many think that the future lies in ‘social push’. It is here, too, that marketers may begin to use mobile apps as tools to understand social behaviour rather than just individual behaviour, and to incentivise it accordingly. The next two years should be quite interesting. As one blogger put it recently: “mobile applications without context provided by location-based services will be like pizza without cheese.”

Certainly, the enthusiasm for so-called ‘first generation’ marketing tools may be waning: email questionnaires and interstitial, or pop-up, website surveys are increasingly a source of irritation to users. But the potential for employing the internet for more qualitative insights may be greater. The interest here has bred the evolving language and terminology of netnography, describing attempts to provide ‘thick descriptions’ of ‘the lived experience of consumers’ and drawing upon established approaches derived from ethnography (Geertz, 1973). Today, that somewhat inelegant word has morphed into the much more fashionable notion of the ‘research community’ and it is here that the attention of many market researchers is now focused. From the marketer’s point of view, a focus on communities has very considerable attractions. We already have a wealth of experience in recognising the importance of brand communities. Studies of brands as varied as Harley-Davidson, Star Trek and Apple have shown the richness of insights which can be gained from recognising and encouraging such phenomena (Schouten & McAlexander, 1995; Kozinets, 2001 and Belk & Tumbat, 2005). The benefits of such communities are clear: greater proximity to the customer, a longer term relationship with that customer, a clearer and earlier sense of the customer’s attitudes towards the brand and concerns; as well as opportunities to co-create new products and services. The risks are also apparent: strong brand communities tend to believe that they, rather than the company, own the brand. Communities outwith the control of the firm can go bad and risk reputational damage to the brand. It’s rather like allowing the cameras in to film a fly-on-the-wall documentary – a calculated risk.

Research communities are more focused and rather less risky vehicles, but offer similar and additional benefits for measurement, insight and analysis in marketing. However, the term conceals a multitude of variants. Research communities can be simply observational, or they can be participatory; narrowly drawn or crowdsourced; tightly focused research instruments or glorified customer feedback schemes. Understanding objectives here is important. For example, UK discount airline Easyjet has created a 2,000-strong research community drawn from customers who have travelled with the airline over the preceding twelve months (Lawrence & Dekkers, 2008). This bounded community is used to generate specific insights from the customer base. By contrast, Starbucks created My Starbucks Idea in 2008 as a crowdsourced feedback and idea generation mechanism (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/). Viewers are invited to vote for their preferred suggestions, the best of which will be implemented. By July 2009, over 74,000 suggestions had been made. Leading ‘ideas in action’ included a Treat Receipt (buy a drink before 2pm and return with the receipt for a discounted drink later in the day) and a key chain ‘mini Starbucks card’.

For marketers, the convergence of online with ethnographic techniques and approaches offers a potentially rich and nuanced toolkit for targeting and analysis. But in moving down the co-creation and collaboration road, marketers need to be aware, too, that there may be natural limits to such collaboration. How many brands are you sufficiently involved with as a consumer to want to devote time to netnographic musings and discussion? Democracy fatigue may yet be waiting in the wings once the novelty wears off.

This blog entry comes from the author’s Editorial for the Journal of Targeting, Measurement & Analysis in Marketing, volume 17(3).

Yet, other things being equal, the business-to-consumer firms which employ Internet technologies to reach customers should be just as exposed to the real economy as conventional firms. And fundamentally, the requirements placed upon online retailers by consumers should be no different from those of store-based businesses: creating and sustaining value for shoppers through skilled product sourcing which will earn their customers’ long-term loyalty. But of course other things may not be equal. Store-based retailers have higher fixed costs in relation to their branch networks (including rental and business rates) by contrast with online-only firms, despite the recent fall in rental levels as landlords seek to fill voids and retain existing tenants. The lower transaction costs that online firms are more easily able to generate and sustain may favour them with consumers who will be more price-sensitive during a downturn. On the other hand, much online shopping is dominated by discretionary purchases, where spending is likely to be more at risk. Similarly, most purchases are made by credit card, a form of payment that tends to come under significant pressure during economically difficult times. And current research is also showing that online users are seeking to trim their overall telecommunications costs, along with other discretionary expenditure. Finally, the reality of much of the contemporary retail scene is essentially multichannel: such retailers see these channel differences at first hand as they seek to understand the changing balance of risks and returns from the contrasting routes to the consumer in which they are simultaneously involved. So, for example, whilst US electrical retailer Best Buy experienced a -1.3% like-for-like store sales fall during 2008, its online proposition experienced a 34% growth (albeit from a smaller base). And UK clothing retailer Next grew its clothing sales online by 1.2% in the first 14 weeks of 2009, by comparison with a -2.3% fall in store sales over the same period.

In all this, there is an implicit assumption that existing online or multi-channel retailers are in control of this process. I would suggest that they are incidental (and potentially temporary) beneficiaries of some more significant shifts in consumer behaviour. What are the indicators of this shift? Here are three examples.

• The significant financial uncertainties of recent months have increasingly favoured sites like Moneysupermarket. Interviewed for the Daily Telegraph at the end of 2008, CEO Simon Nixon suggested that: “People are going to the website as they are basically tightening their belts. Customers are also reviewing what they pay in insurance and utility bills rather than automatically renewing… but customers are more savvy now than they were maybe 12 months ago. They are looking at perhaps two or three price comparison sites. But the market is not very mature and I would say most people will be looking at comparison sites online within the next three to five years.” The growth in the popularity of vouchers and rewards is also indicative of consumer interest: according to Nielsen, 9.8mn UK consumers used a voucher or reward site in 2008, with such sites experiencing a doubling of unique visitors between December 2007 and 2008.

• Another indicator of the longer term shift is the extent to which social networks are playing a role in a variety of sometimes poorly understood ways in driving retail business, despite – or perhaps because of – their current fashionability. This may range from raising awareness of new products to driving referrals to retailers. The blogs of Shiny Media (see table) now attract 3.1mn unique visitors each month offering 40 blogs in five categories (fashion, technology, lifestyle, sport and gaming), which include two lifestyle blogs launched in the US in 2007, and a YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/shinymedia). Commercial blog publishers play a potentially powerful role in creating new product buzz for marketers, but must tread a careful line between blatant product endorsement and spirited independence if they are to retain both the trust of their audience and the support of brand manufacturers in making available new products. Retail and other brand marketers are becoming cannier at advertising on such sites as well as on more conventional social networks. Internet analysts Hitwise reported that UK social networks provided over 7% of referrals to retail websites in March 2009. Retailers like Hotel Chocolat have become adept proponents of affiliate marketing: 25% of direct sales are now driven through this source. Similarly, strong multichannel brands like Mothercare are making investments in social media – such as their Gurgle parenting forum (www.gurgle.com) to, amongst other things, sustain buzz about the brand during the downturn.

• Finally, though, the economic downturn has stimulated the further growth of new forms of intermediation. As some consumers need increasingly to make ends meet, they are resorting to both selling their own goods (both second-hand and new) online as well as seeking out new and nearly-new bargains. The OXFAM online charity shop made £5mn in its first year of operation in the UK, selling 3,400 women’s tops, from Abercrombie to Armani. eBay’s refocusing of its efforts away from auctions and towards a more conventional online marketplace may have been mistimed, given the bargain-seeking behaviour of an impoverished shopper, although UK eBay traders generated £2bn in sales in 2008. Sites like Zlio.com (“the Internet version of a Tupperware party”), Osoyou.com and aStores (http://aStore.amazon.com) encourage consumers to establish their own stores building upon their own buying experiences, and reward them with commission.

So perhaps in an economic downturn, we’re all retailers now.

Reproduced with permission of Admap, the world’s primary source of strategies for effective advertising, marketing and research. To subscribe visit www.admapmagazine.com.  © Copyright Admap.

He knew most of his customers by name and reputation.

In the 1960s, the demography changed to include a greater West Indian population and so he included salt cod and Jamaican dry crackers. In an area of London that included pockets of real deprivation and before the invention of credit cards, he gave credit to regular customers.

Paramount Fruiterers, Stoke Newington

He knew most of his customers by name and reputation, and although by nature he was rather taciturn, he became a well-loved character along with Queenie from the flower stall and Sonny the barber.

The Stoke Newington of today provides a retail environment that Uncle Sam would barely recognise, with its delicatessens, bars and restaurants. Fresh & Wild is busy with the wealthy, middle class packing organic produce into cotton bags. The few remaining residents who remember Sam call these newcomers ‘Stokies’. The Victorian school has been converted into luxury apartments, the large houses around the common have been refurbished and the Peabody blocks that housed most of Sam’s customers demolished and replaced long ago.

It leads me to wonder how Uncle Sam would have responded to the challenge of Fresh & Wild and Sainsbury’s Local on his doorstep, with Tesco Extra a short drive away. In one way, he was ahead of the game – he delivered. He took orders over the phone or in person, from scraps of paper or repeats from previous weeks. He delivered to tenements and rooms in houses, to grand Georgian mansions, to blocks of flats where the lift never worked and to local businesses. In the early days he used a sack barrow and then a bike and later a Ford Cortina estate. Reflecting on Sam’s home delivery service, I decide to put the UK’s many online grocers of the 21st century to the test.

[If you want to read Christine’s detailed assessment of the comparative merits of each online grocer, please let us know! The full review will appear in the next edition of the Retail Digest, and will be posted on the blog soon.]

It is remarkable that in the UK I have such a choice of online grocers, and although I live in the populous south east, it’s a service available to almost every household. Ocado are the only online grocers to use a custom-built warehouse, while the others continue picking in store. One of the big four UK grocers is notable for its absence in online delivery -Morrisons. There is also much more than grocery shopping to be done at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose – though not Ocado, who are specialist grocery.

There are diets and contact lenses, pet insurance, furniture, recipes, competitor price comparisons, electronics, ‘green’ tips, community projects, special interest clubs, – all over and above the separate wine and flowers offers.

While I wonder about who to settle with, I continue to receive plenty of offers in an attempt to grab my loyalty. There seems very little in the way of barriers to switching between online grocers now that navigation, speed and payment systems are so slick. They have had plenty of practice at getting the service right since their experiments with online grocery in the mid to late 1990s. Ocado’s attempt at providing a barrier is a yearly subscription charge that gives free delivery no matter how many times you order (providing orders are over £40). At first, they offer membership for half the usual price of £99.99 per year, and then a free two-week trial. Almost immediately, Waitrose become the first online grocer to offer free delivery on orders over £50. Next, Ocado offer Waitrose own-label for less than Waitrose offer in-store or online. And Ocado then send me an email when it is voted Which? Magazine’s best online supermarket6 – just ahead of second-placed Waitrose. There’s quite a battle ensuing and I wouldn’t like to try and predict a winner – unless it’s the consumer. And to be quite honest, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to trail around a supermarket on a weekly basis any more.

And finally I discover that Waitrose is delivering by bicycles. Yes, I think that Uncle Sam was definitely ahead of the game.

Nevertheless, and nearly 300,000 retailers in the UK employ over three million people and approaching GBP300bn was spent in retail last year. Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Tesco are among the largest firms in the world, and retailers both large and small are in a position to affect a nation’s health and wealth. Retailing is ubiquitous and its origins go back into prehistory. Despite its image, the retail industry represents a rich and rewarding area for both employment and multi-disciplinary study with wide-reaching effects and global implications.

The figure below identifies the main activities in any field of study as ‘research’, ‘education’ and ‘practice’ (also identified as ‘thinking’, ‘disseminating’ and ‘doing’), together with the intersections ‘scholarship’, ‘consultancy’ and ‘training’. ‘Retail studies’ as a field of study may be considered ‘vocational’ and therefore differs from, for example, English literature or medieval studies, in its relationship to ‘practice’. In that way, retail studies might be considered more akin to, for example, archaeology or medicine.

Retail knowledge

There are very many differences between retail studies and other vocational domains, however. Great advances in medical science generally come from academic endeavour, whereas many of the world’s most successful retail businesses have been created with very little of what might be described as ‘academic influence’. A lecturer in archaeology may quite correctly be described as an archaeologist when he has spent a sabbatical unearthing Neolithic pottery in Jordan but a business school faculty member is less likely to gain kudos from her peers by describing herself as a retail executive after a summer at Topps Tiles. Even a close association with Fortune 100 retail firms such as Wal-Mart and Tesco is unlikely to generate the approbation from colleagues that would come from time spent with some less successful non-retail firms such as Microsoft and Sony.

The Oxford Institute of Retail Management, established in 1985, has always aimed to present sound scholarship to the practical needs of retailers and to relate practical experience to academics, analysts and commentators throughout the retail industry.  To support this aim, the Institute created the European Retail Digest in 1994 to allow both practitioners and researchers to share experience and relevant research. For 15 years, the Institute has presented a rich mixture of retail research and practice of interest to our wide audience.

In 2007, following a restructuring of the executive education provision at the University of Oxford, the Oxford Institute of Retail Management moved from Templeton College to the Saïd Business School. Beginning with the Spring 2008 edition, the renamed Retail Digest was revisioned to better reflect the Institute’s strategic standpoint and international focus, as well as the Saïd Business School branding.

In terms of the retail body of knowledge, there is a chasm between Retail Week for the trade and the Journal of Retailing for academics. The two publications have very different audiences and it is the aim of the Retail Digest to provide something for both sets of readers – bridging the gap to some extent with ‘readable rigour’.

The Digest is organised around the three areas of retail reflection, retail policy and retail practice that represent the concerns of the Institute and bring together the elements of retail as a field of study. Each edition of the Retail Digest opens with retail reflection, where both researchers and practitioners take time to read around the subject, reflect on real retail experiences, comment on conferences attended or websites visited and speculate on issues of current interest in a way that can never be acceptable in an academic journal but is never-the-less rooted in a deep understanding of the retail industry.

Government and corporate policy in the retail industry provides the second focus for the Retail Digest including interviews with corporate and government policy-makers. This also allows us to introduce some of the other areas of social science research that take place in the Saïd Business School and in the wider University of Oxford to reflect retail studies as a truly multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary filed of study.

The final section on retail practice presents the current state of the retail industry worldwide with articles from our extensive network of retail experts in all markets and sectors as well as interviews with senior retail executives and a store showcase.

Government also sees potential benefit in bringing together retail practice and retail research, and there are many initiatives in the UK including SkillSmart Retail and the Retail Academy, and BERR’s Retail Policy Forum aimed at consultation at an early stage in the development of regulation. Oxford Institute of Retail Management is in a good position to facilitate such dialogue. In a recent initiative, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) announced funding of GBP1.4 million to establish a network to build closer links between the retail industry and leading retail researchers. Jonathan Reynolds, Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, will serve as Associate Director of the network.

The Retail Industry Business Engagement Network (RIBEN) will bring together four of the UK’s leading retail research groups from the Universities of Oxford, Leeds, Southampton and Surrey. The four groups have complementary retail industry/research council/government department linkages, skills and methodological orientations, and together they are in position to act as facilitators of wider social science engagement with the industry. The network will host 15 CASE doctoral studentships, a series of knowledge transfer partnerships and placements, and an innovative voucher scheme for small and medium-sized enterprises, under which businesses can apply to ‘cash in’ a voucher in return for coaching or tutorial support from faculty in the member universities. The network will be formally launched later on this year.

An annual high-profile meeting will showcase research underway and practitioner case studies; and six-monthly workshops will focus on regional knowledge and skills transfer.
The funding is part of a GBP6 million investment announced by the ESRC, as part of its commitment to support research and training essential to the international competitiveness of UK business.

The retail industry provides academics with a rich area for multi-disciplinary research and relevant retail research offers the retail practitioner insights from across retail sectors, disciplines and continents. And that’s what you will find in the Retail Digest.