Ebook: Fashion Retailing : Part 2

Grete Birtwistle is the Head of Division of Marketing at the Caledonian Business School, GlasgowCaledonian University. She has extensive fashion retailing experience and her PhD investigated thearea of store image and store positioning for fashion retailers. In particular, she highlighted theimportance of retail staff perception of store image factors and that employees should be advocatesof the company. She has published a number of papers and made contributions to books, mainly onareas of fashion marketing. Her current research explores ways of increasing the speed in thefashion supply chain and in order to achieve this she is interviewing both suppliers at differentstages within the chain as well as buyers and logistics managers from retail companies. She is amember of the Glasgow Centre for Retailing and through this forum provides business withtraining courses and consultancy advice. Her main teaching areas are fashion marketing,integrated fashion logistics and integrated fashion communication. She has recently been a guestlecturer at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Monash University, Melbourne and GriffithUniversity, Gold Coast, Australia. Christopher M. Moore, MA (Hons), MBA, PhD, is the Director for the Glasgow Centre forRetailing at Glasgow Caledonian University. A graduate of the Universities of Glasgow andStirling, his doctoral thesis considered the internationalisation of foreign fashion retailers into theUK. His research interests include fashion buying and merchandising, fashion brand developmentand the internationalisation strategies of luxury brand retailers. His research activities haveallowed him to work with many of the key international fashion retailers. He has recentlyco-authored with Professor John Fernie and Suzanne Fernie a major new textbook on retailing andmarketing, Principles of Retailing. He is the assistant editor of the Journal of Customer Behaviourand sits on the editorial panels of a number of leading academic journals. Professor Moorecurrently holds the Scotmid chair in retailing. Scotmid is Scotland’s largest independentco-operative society. As part of his remit as director for the Glasgow Centre for Retailing, his dutiesinclude providing research and consultancy services for major retailers and consumer-facingorganisations. Welcome to the second of two special editions on Fashion Marketing. The editors weredelighted with the response to the call for papers and the quality of submitted paperswas so high that it has led to two editions being published.The articles in this edition follows the product supply chain commencing with apaper exploring issues on buying and sourcing of fashion goods, moving on to growthstrategies of luxury brand management. This is followed by a comparison of store,internet and catalogue shopping behaviour which leads on to two customer servicepaper. The edition concludes with an exploration of the importance of fashion assemiotic markers for gay males. The first paper by Haesun Park and Leslie Stoel explores the process of sociallyresponsible buying and sourcing. Buyers in US apparel and shoe companies wereasked for their opinions and the study explored the various factors influencing thedecision-making. The authors conclude that individual’s attitudes towards ethics andsocial responsibility and personal sources such as peer behaviour influenced ethicaland socially responsible perceptions and consequently the process of buying andsourcing. Using the case study based on David Linley & Co. Ltd Stephen Doyle and JennyReid considers the adaptability of the traditional growth strategies of couture/fashion houses in the context of non-fashion sectors. In particular, the paper explores therelevance of implementing a strategy based upon product extension as a means tomarket development and internationalisation. Examining the higher echelons of the fashion distribution hierarchy, Moore andBirtwistle’s paper examines the realisation of parenting advantage within multi-brandluxury fashion conglomerates. By delineating the three-phased rejuvenation of theGucci Group, they propose that expertise in luxury brand management and theexploitation of intra-business synergies are the core competitive advantages exploitedby this entrepreneurial fashion empire. The paper concludes by proposing a model forluxury fashion brand creation and management. The following two papers appraise different aspects of internet versus store andcatalogue shopping. The paper by Ronald E. Goldsmith and Leisa R. Flynn comparesshopping behaviour across the three modes and found that regular purchasers ofclothing were likely to use all three, likely to be more involved with fashion and morefashion innovative than those buyers purchasing less fashion. Furthermore, findingsindicate that consumer perception of internet shopping was more highly related tocatalogue shopping than purchasing from a store. The second paper on online shopping, by Minjeong Kim and Leslie Stoel, comparesthe customer service dimensions in stores and online and evaluates how attitudetowards online customer service provisions influences purchase intent. The findingsconfirm that ease of navigation, availability of FAQs and in-stock information as wellas ease of comparison shopping were important predictors of online purchase intent.Customer satisfaction with the retail offer is the tenet of the next paper by RoseOtieno, Chris Harrow and Gaynor Lea-Greenwood. The research proposes that a largepercentage of the female population are reporting dissatisfaction with not only thestyle and size of garments but also the whole retail environment to the extent that theydemonstrate avoidance behaviour. This is particularly demonstrated by those wearingclothes larger than the standard UK size 16. The final paper explores the importance of fashion as semiotic markers for gaymales. In particular, it considers clothing as a way of communication of the individual’sidentity. The findings identify the existence of specific codes with cultural embeddedmeanings which gay men can choose to identify with and make use of in differentsituations. The paper discusses the marketing implications of the findings.The above papers cover a variety of subjects in the discipline of fashion marketing.The strength of these are in the contributions made by the International authors as wellas the depth of the research and analysis. The editors are grateful for all thecontributions made to these two special editions and regret that lack of space did notallow more papers to be published. Grete Birtwistle and Christopher M. Moore Previously published in: Library Review, Volume: 33, Number 4, 2005