Chiara Mauri

Recent research has frequently remarked the increased crowding of store shelves driven by grocery manufacturers' product expansion strategies. However, many new products are imitations, copycats, and lookalikes of leading brands, adding further complexity to consumer choice decisions. The high degree of similarity between products not only contributes to consumers' information overload but also leads to increased brand confusion. This paper examines the academic debate on brand confusion through a systematic literature network analysis and introduces MIRROR, a thematic framework structured around six dominant perspectives that have shaped the understanding of this phenomenon: M for Mimicry, I for Imitation strategies, R for Reactions, R for Replication, O for Overall imitation effects, R for Retail price confusion. The acronym MIRROR also metaphorically reflects the competitive dynamics among products that adopt imitation strategies to capture consumer attention and drive purchase decisions.

Policy makers around the world are facing serious challenges in controlling citizens' obesity and healthiness, hence, they devote increased attention to the development of tools that communicate easily processable nutrition information. Front-of-package nutrition labels are one of such tools and have been used to signal the extent to which food items contain potentially unhealthy ingredients such as sugar or fat. In this research, we focus on sugar cues on three different food categories to investigate their impact on consumer choice. We compare two labels, one already used (traffic-light) and one never used (sugar teaspoon): sugar teaspoons prove to be more effective than the previously used traffic-lights in healthy product choices, but only for specific food categories. In two experiments, we find that sugar teaspoon labels indicating sugar content, as opposed to traffic-light labels, are more effective in signaling sugar levels and thus, in helping consumers making healthier choices. We find that this is particularly relevant for food categories that have a simpler ingredient composition (i.e., whose healthiness relies more heavily on sugar). We finally propose processing fluency as the mechanism for the relation between sugar signals and product choices.

The paper investigates the extent to which tourists perceive boredom during their winter mountain holiday. The Leisure Boredom Scale (S.E. Iso-Ahola & Weissinger, 1990) was applied to segment tourists on the base of their perceived boredom. An empirical research operated in an Alpine region revealed the existence of two segments who experience boredom: Bored tourists and Excited-Bored tourists (21% of the tourists). This evidence contradicts results found in previous literature that boredom is associated to passive behaviour, and shows that boredom co-exists with excitement. The majority of these tourists are mothers accompanying their relatives, stay in hotels, and choose either the chief town Aosta or minor locations. Bored tourists are involved in many activities, and spend even more than other tourists.

New technologies are reshaping the retail industry and have become a significant driver of customer value creation and retail profitability. In the academic literature, these technologies have been generally studied either from the retailer's perspective or from the consumer's perspective, but to our knowledge never from the manufacturer's perspective. However, manufacturers are heavily involved in how their products and brands are stocked, displayed and sold by retailers, and invest significant resources in visual merchandising activities. It follows that manufacturers who sell through retail stores can take a significant stake in the development and implementation of new technologies to enhance their customers' experience and to increase the effectiveness of their brand's visual merchandising. An empirical research on a sample of 145 manufacturers of the grocery industry in Italy shows that: a) visual merchandising activities are oriented mainly to improve retail in-store efficiency, i.e. to optimize space management; b) there are four segments of manufacturers who assign different priorities to visual merchandising; and c) in each segment there is a very high variance in the willingness to implement in-store digital. Results confirm that in-store digital technologies are still an area of experimentation and test to estimate the effectiveness of digital tools.

Purpose: This paper aims to shed light on the demand side of sustainability, that is, on its perceived meaning. The goal is to understand how people think of sustainability, the concepts they evoke when they talk of sustainability and the images and symbols they use to explain these concepts. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a mixed method. First, ten individuals are interviewed using the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET), a protocol developed by Gerald Zaltman in the early 1990s. The concepts and categories emerging from the ZMET have been analyzed, integrated and classified to identify key dimensions. Findings: Ten concepts related to sustainability are the most recurring in the ZMET: problems and solutions, individual behavior, environment and ecosystem, technologies and innovations, social fairness, food and nutrition, mobility, education and mindfulness, sustainable development and utopia/ideal world. Research limitations/implications: Ten interviews is a small number to provide a comprehensive analysis of all the meanings of sustainability. To obtain a more complete picture, the number of interviews may need to be increased to 15–20. Practical implications: The fact that the two concepts appearing with the highest frequency in the ZMETs are “problems and solutions” and “individual behavior” signals that though people understand that there are many problems to be solved in the world as it is now, even the single individual can contribute with his/her behavior. Social implications: Sustainability is an issue that involves society as a whole; hence, its improvement requires concerted political action coordinated at the national and local levels. The key point of this action is education of people, to make them aware of what sustainability really is. Originality/value: Although the literature on sustainability is rather abundant, extant literature has mainly focused on the supply/managerial side such as sustainable and responsible companies, corporate social responsibility and also sustainable tourism. This paper sheds some light on the more neglected side of the demand perspective.

This study investigates how digital transformation has disrupted the marketing career path by analysing the most in-demand marketing skills and identifying opportunities for future marketing professionals. Through a content analysis of job advertisements and a cross-country survey of marketing professionals, the study proposes a framework defining the skillset required of marketing professionals to start and move forward in their career. The study identifies five employability skill categories and 29 skills and capabilities. The relevance of such categories is also analysed across lowly and highly digitalised firms. This research contributes to the debate on the employability of new graduates and provides useful directions to universities, tertiary education institutions, and companies to support the marketing talents of the future.