Abstract

Traditional retail marketing theory has aimed to assist retailers with ideas, suggestions, and methods to attract shoppers and encourage them to spend, and ideally engender loyalty. Attracting shoppers, and encouraging them to purchase, has traditionally involved a range of marketing tactics within the retail environment, such as hanging banners, engaging barkers, playing music, designing elaborate store environments, and spending a continually increasing amount on advertising. We take a different approach with this book and ask the retailer to strategically consider and understand its customer base, particularly the issues surrounding why some customers may, or may not, choose to purchase (or shop) at all: what we define as the inscrutable shopper. While some retailers will not need to do any more than let the customer know that they exist (they have their formula just right), the reality for many retailers is that they are caught up in the business of day-to-day retail operations and lose sight of customer shifts, let alone have the time to consider why customers may not be purchasing. Hence the focus of this book is to provide an understanding of the different customer types that exist today, as a challenge of resistance to consumption. This learning is applicable to the retail industry and all stakeholders who supply it. The authors, all retail experts, have researched retail and consumer trends around the globe to develop a picture of consumer resistance in contemporary retailing, as well as provide a view of successful strategies that have been employed by other retailers to manage the inscrutable shopper. These trends, and the values and motivations that underlie them, reveal that consumer resistance can take on many forms, from a minor private concern to major public protest. The book explores the various strategies to engage inscrutable shoppers, who may be dissatisfied with ethical, green, or broader social issues. Retailers, business students, and small business owners will find the insights in this research book valuable to their efforts in being contemporary, relevant, and engaging to the often unmanageable, uncontrollable, complex, and constantly changing inscrutable shopper.

Keywords

Consumer resistance, anticonsumption, retail strategy, consumer behavior, environmentalism, green consumer, consumer boycotts