A good customer is hard to find. And even harder to keep. However, driving customers wild with brand-, product- or service-induced desire is the hardest thing of all. How is it done? How do masterful marketing organisations, such as Apple or H&M, turn sceptical customers into slavering...

The study of micro-retail location has attracted relatively little geographical attention hitherto and this paper examines the micro-spatial perceptions of retailers in the centre of Belfast.It demonstrates the functional significance of 'generative,' 'shared' and 'suscipient' businesses and...

This interpretive study introduces the field of Utopian studies and explores its relevance in re-conceptualising certain aspects of consumer research. Making reference to a longitudinal study carried out in a festival marketplace, this paper illustrates how the concept of Utopia can yield rich...

What is the secret of marketing success? For fifty plus years, customer orientation has been regarded as a key factor, possibly the key factor. This may have been the case when marketing was in its infancy, but in a world where every organization has embraced the marketing philosophy, customer...

For more than forty years, marketers have worshipped at the feet of customers. While such a strategy may have worked in a world when customer-orientation was a comparative rarity, it is ineffective when every organisation is customer-centric, or claims to be. This article argues that marketers...

Retro brands are relaunched historical brands with updated features. The authors conduct a "netnographic" analysis of two prominent retro brands, the Volkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, that reveals the importance of Allegory (brand story), Aura (brand...

The internal layout of a shopping centre and the spatial relationships of the individual shop units within it are important, to retailers and planners alike. However, relatively little work has been done on analysing the behaviour of pedestrians within shopping centres. To remedy this a...

Although the issue of retail location has attracted a great deal of academic attention, the bulk of this literature pertains lo the national, regional and urban scales of analysis. An equally important, but comparatively neglected, consideration is micro-scale retail location; that is, location...

Despite the enormous amount of research effort that the geography of retailing has generated in recent years, there have been comparatively few long term studies of retail change. This paper explores the processes and patterns of change in the central shopping district of Belfast between 1950...

This study explores the concept of self for women in consumer culture, as it is played out in an experiential advertising campaign for a U.K. women's magazine called Red. The study qualitatively explores the tensions and ambivalences experienced by female participants in response to a campaign...