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Food retailers invest heavily in design expertise to create exciting packaging to entice customers to buy premium food products, and to strengthen their competitive edge. The process by which food retailers manage food packaging design has not been documented and this is an oversight in the design management and retailing literatures that this paper addresses. An in-depth case study of one of the top four UK retailers is presented and their approach pack design management is analysed and discussed. The process outlined here was in place in 1997 at a time when the retailer had just moved from number three in the market place to number two and was aiming to be number one. The process documented is that of a dynamic growing food retailer working on improving its brand image through packaging design.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between the online consumer behaviour constructs of attitude, motivations and information search in order to develop an online consumer behaviour framework.Design/methodology/approachAn email survey collected data from 577 UK respondents and canonical correlations are applied to examine the relationships.FindingsThe results provide empirical support that attitude is an antecedent variable, and that motivation variables have a significant causal relationship with information search variables.Research limitations/implicationsTwo limitations are identified. Firstly, the data collected focussed on UK respondents, consequently the generalisability of these results is in question and further research is required. Secondly, the attitude measure could include more items to further aid reliability.Originality/valueThis research advances the development of the Online Consumer Behaviour literature by adding knowledge on the nature of the relationships between online behaviour constructs.

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Online fashion retailing is a major growth area. Innovative online fit and sizing technologies that facilitate purchase continue to develop and launch, however, problems associated with digital expectations of fit and size in consumer decision-making, remain unresolved. This research focuses on 20 prominent fit and size technologies from a sample of 30, and uses content analysis to examine website design and operation. Content analysis combined with an extended literature review enables the linking of academic theory and practice. The research provides discussion for best-practice utilisation of fit and sizing technology through the Omni-fit model, which accounts for the combination of technological approaches, and the emerging influence of augmented and virtual reality fashion technology. The results include the need for improvements to 3D visualisation, user experience, and online customer relationship management of existing websites, aligned with Omni-channel retailing practice.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to analyse online consumers' experiential responses towards visual user-generated content in social commerce fashion online shopping environments. The study develops and tests a UGC OCE framework incorporating aesthetic and relational experiential paths in the OCE.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a quantitative approach to examine fashion consumers experiential responses to UGC content. The sample comprised 555 respondents recruited via a consumer panel. SEM analysis was employed to analyse and test the framework model.FindingsThe findings illustrate that consumers are initially stimulated by an aesthetic experience, which then triggers a combination of relational, emotional and interactive experiences in fashion social commerce. The study extends the S-O-R framework by integrating it to the experiential “path” that indicates the series of experiences consumers encounter. Using S-O-R, the study presents the consumers' online experiential responses to viewing visual UGC, revealing that there are five experiential responses, all of which have an influence on online consumer behaviour. Responses towards visual UGC include visual, relational, emotional, cognitive engagement and interactive engagement, which were all identified to influence purchase intention.Originality/valueThis study is original in finding that, in the context of online fashion shopping, aesthetics drive relational experiences, and relational experiences drive flow and interactive behaviour and also purchase intention. Aesthetic experiences and positive emotions are powerful drivers of purchase intention and drive connectedness, flow and interactive behaviour. This study extends the literature by extending the frameworks in OCE and CE into the fashion UGC context.

Food retailers invest heavily in design expertise to create exciting packaging and to develop store environments to entice customers to buy premium food products, and to strengthen their competitive edge. The process by which food retailers manage design has not been documented and this is an oversight in the field of design management that this paper addresses. Cases of four UK retailers are presented and their approaches to design management are compared and discussed. A model of retail design management is presented which represents current`b etter practice'' in UK food retail; in addition, a model of the seven Ps of design management is presented to foster better understanding of the role of food retail design management function.