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Showing papers by "David Bell published in 2011"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper found that the amount of unplanned buying increases monotonically with the abstractness of the overall shopping trip goal that is established before the shopper enters the store, and that store-linked goals also affect unplanned purchases.
Abstract: Many retailers believe that a majority of purchases are unplanned, so they spend heavily on in-store marketing to stimulate these types of purchases. At the same time, the effects of “preshopping” factors—the shoppers' overall trip goals, store-specific shopping objectives, and prior marketing exposures—are largely unexplored. The authors focus on these out-of-store drivers and, unlike prior research, use panel data to “hold the shopper constant” while estimating unbiased trip-level effects. Thus, they uncover opportunities for retailers to generate more unplanned buying from existing shoppers. The authors find that the amount of unplanned buying increases monotonically with the abstractness of the overall shopping trip goal that is established before the shopper enters the store. Store-linked goals also affect unplanned buying; unplanned buying is higher on trips in which the shopper chooses the store for favorable pricing and lower on trips in which the shopper chooses the store as part of a mu...

166 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use sales data from Diapers.com, the leading U.S. online retailer for baby diapers, to show why geographic variation in preference minority status of target customers explains geographic variations in online sales.
Abstract: Offline retailers face trading area and shelf space constraints, so they offer products tailored to the needs of the majority. Consumers whose preferences are dissimilar to the majority—“preference minorities”—are underserved offline and should be more likely to shop online. The authors use sales data from Diapers.com, the leading U.S. online retailer for baby diapers, to show why geographic variation in preference minority status of target customers explains geographic variation in online sales. They find that, holding the absolute number of the target customers constant, online category sales are more than 50% higher in locations where customers suffer from preference isolation. Because customers in the preference minority face higher offline shopping costs, they are also less price sensitive. niche brands, compared with popular brands, show even greater offline-to-online sales substitution. This greater sensitivity to preference isolation means that these brands in the tail of the long tail di...

105 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the ways in which cosmetic surgery tourism can be thought of specifically as a tourist experience and explored the elements of tourism that seem important to a successful tourist experience, including a sense of place, constituted through cultural and physical proximity or distance, and discursive and physical construction of a destination's particular characteristics.
Abstract: This paper explores the ways in which cosmetic surgery tourism can be thought of specifically as a tourist experience. We argue that whilst essentially involving travel for the purpose of undertaking painful surgery, cosmetic surgery tourism has a particular resonance with the holiday, most usually constructed as relaxing and restorative. This resonance is connected to the importance in contemporary society of not simply possessing the cultural capital associated with travel knowledge and conspicuous leisure, but of being able to mark that upon and express it through the body. The paper also explores the elements of tourism that seem important to a successful cosmetic surgery tourism experience. These include a sense of place, constituted through cultural and physical proximity or distance, and discursive and physical construction of a destination’s particular characteristics – most usually in terms of the idea of ‘retreat’, care and the ‘friendliness’ of its people. This is connected to the willingness o...

45 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
13 Feb 2011-City
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that there is much to be gained from a more focused and sustained theoretical engagement with twinning and highlight the twinning activities of the city of Manchester (UK), drawing out two key dimensions of twinning.
Abstract: Twinning is a practice that creates formal and informal political, economic, social and cultural relationships between cities throughout the world. Despite its prevalence there has been relatively little academic attention paid to twinning. Indeed, where writers have considered city twinning they have tended to describe local institutional structures and programmes of events rather than theorising the importance of twinning as a global practice. Although producing a detailed picture of current twinning arrangements, existing research has thus glossed over the wider significance of twinning. In this paper, we argue that there is much to be gained from a more focused and sustained theoretical engagement with twinning. We do this by highlighting the twinning activities of the city of Manchester (UK), drawing out two key dimensions of twinning, namely, hospitality and relationality, which reveal twinning as a symptomatic urban process. In doing so we signpost the important contribution that research into twinning can make to broader debates within urban theory.

43 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how the shift from the lifestyled downshifting narrative of the River Cottage series to the ‘campaigning culinary documentary’ Hugh's Chicken Run exposes issues of celebrity, class and ethics.
Abstract: Lifestyle television provides a key site through which to explore the dilemmas of ethical consumption, as the genre shifts to consider the ethics of different consumption practices and taste cultures. UK television cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV programmes offer fertile ground not only for thinking about television personalities as lifestyle experts and moral entrepreneurs, but also for thinking about how the meanings and uses of their television image are inflected by genre. In this article we explore how the shift from the lifestyled downshifting narrative of the River Cottage series to the ‘campaigning culinary documentary’ Hugh's Chicken Run exposes issues of celebrity, class and ethics. While both series are concerned with ethical consumption, they work in different ways to reveal a distinction between ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ consumption practices and positions – positions that are inevitably classed.

27 citations