Guest editorial: Building resilience in retail for the post COVID world – marketing and operations perspectives

Abstract

This special issue features a selection of the best papers presented at the 6th Colloquium on European Research in Retailing (CERR), where academics discussed the challenges retailers faced in overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the numerous disruptions. The Colloquium took place at the Sophia Antipolis campus, near Nice, of the SKEMA Business School on July 15th to July 17th and was chaired by Prof. Xavier Brusset together with Professor Marta Frasquet from Valencia University. At this edition of the Colloquium, as it took place less than a year after the preceding one in Valencia, expectations about the number of submissions were low. Yet, perhaps because participants were spurred by the possibility of meeting in person or because the topic was enticing, 53 papers were presented over two days, covering a wide array of retailing topics relevant to professionals and academics. Austrians and French academics were present on site in numbers and quality. As this was a hybrid event, slightly more than half of the participants were following or presenting their work online.The turmoil that has followed the pandemic has brought on a considerable number of changes in consumers' and retailers' attitudes and behaviours. New trends have been started, new retail formats and new services have been invented. Traditional visions of consumer attitudes about how, what and where to buy have had to be discarded or completely revisited. Retailers who understood how to transform themselves and were agile enough to do so have been able to prosper. On one hand, such trends as consumer adoption of the mobile channel, the search for environmentally safe products and services have all been exacerbated over the last two years. On the other hand, the new needs and the disruptions in the supply chains able to provide for them have led to extensive inventory problems throughout the retail industry, from garments, to cars, to electronic products and food.In this special issue, the articles can be separated into three major areas. In the first, scholars looked into the changing nature of consumers' attitudes towards retail. The research is of an observatory nature and tries to understand the changing consumption patterns and the emergence of the mobile channel (or m-channel). In Azuma et al. (2022), UNIQLO's strategy to aggregate disparate consumer segments so as to hold onto a large slide of the "bigmiddle" retail market. Bezes (2022) shows how the image of the retailer and its online and mobile channels all contribute to the overall customer satisfaction, especially if the images of all channels are congruent. Risberg and Jafari (2022) find that the sales mix between channels influences the last-mile delivery practices and consumer experience. In particular, retail chains with large physical stores offering remote services in some way are competing with their own network.In the second, the focus of study is mobile shopping. Since this new channel became of age, retailers have been trying to harness its power. In this catego...

Post-Pandemic M-Commerce—Leveraging Users’ Review Comments to Enhance Mobile Grocery-Shopping Applications (MGSAs)

“…Grocery shopping through m-applications was one of the most undeveloped branches of e-commerce before the pandemic, even in developed countries [8], mostly due to the logistical challenges faced by the retailers [13] and the inadequacy of the infrastructure [14]. The pandemic context, however, led to an accelerated development of online grocery platforms and MGSAs [15] by improving, up to a certain point, the reliability of the ordering process and its logistics, resulting in an increase in the number of individuals shopping for groceries online, either by using platforms or m-applications. The relevant literature focusing on explaining consumers' behaviour in the context of situational factors, such as sanitary restrictions and new social norms, suggests that this new trend might be reversible [11], while other studies contend that the recently adopted shopping behaviours may result in a new normal [16].…”

Exploring CBD Retail Performance, Recovery and Resilience of a Smart City Following COVID-19

“…By assessing the connections between the physical and social environment of a smart city and the ability of a CBD to generate resilient foot traffic to support retail, the paper provides a unique and informative case analysis of a city in transition. The study contributes to extending the research on regional development and urban resilience [10,14] by providing evidence on how retail districts can be agile enough to prosper under the negative impacts of COVID-19 and increasing competition from online retailing channels [15].…”