Research On The Influence Of Time And Space Factors On Associated Sales Of Offline Retail Shops

With the rapid advancement of mobile internet and the rapid development of the Internet of Things technology,the original time and space distance between consumers and businesses has been broken.Offline brick-and-mortar shops in the ear of mobile Internet need to provide more innovative services to meet the increasing needs of consumers.As a result,Location-Based Services(LBS),an Io T technology,is widely used in the marketing activities of offline brick-and-mortar shops.The combination of mobile internet and location-based services allows consumers to access the merchant information without the limitation by time and space.It also allows the merchants to provide information about the product at a specified time and place with the consumer’s authorization.Thus,how to prompt the most appropriate product information to the consumer by taking advantage of consumers’ time and space environment becomes the focus of designing the notification content.This study inserts the concept namely time and space factors to the research on associated sales of offline retail shops to explore the question “Where? When? How?” This study intends to focus on the impact of the time and space factors of mobile marketing in offline retailing on associated sales,and to explore the mechanism behind the impact to provide effective recommendations to shopping malls and offline retail shops on how to conduct associated sales under mobile marketing.This study based on theories related to construal level theory,spreading activation theory,assimilation-contrast theory,spillover effect theory and association rules,uses econometric methods to explore the above issues.Firstly,this study examines the sales association effects between brands and between brands and consumers in offline retail shops.Consumers usually make cross-brand decisions when shopping in large shopping centres.Due to the complementary or competitive nature of brands,the choice of one brand may influence the choice of another brand.Based on this,this study uses the Apriori algorithm to investigate the associated effects of different brands on consumers’ purchasing behavior in large retail outlets.The study finds that the brands in the fast fashion category are strongly associated with each other,indicating that consumers are likely to make multi-brand purchases in fast fashion brands.Secondly,this study focuses on inter-brand associated sales and investigates the impact of time and space factors on inter-brand associated sales in offline retail shops from a retail perspective.By analyzing the spatial location data,daily sales data over a20-day period and customer flows data at different times of the day for 737 offline retail shops s in a large shopping centre in China,the study uses a spatial lag model,a spatial error model and a spatial Durbin model to explore the spatial interaction effects and sales associations between different types of offline retail shops.The study found that the sales of offline retail shops are negatively affected by the shops in their neighboring locations,but positively affected by the number of people entering the surrounding shops at midday.At the same time,an increase in the number of people entering the shop in the evening effectively increases the sales of the offline retail shops.The findings of this study enrich the application of spatial effects in marketing theory.Finally,this paper focuses on the associated sales between brands and consumers,and analyses the influence of spatial and temporal factors on the associated sales between consumers and brands from the perspective of the consumption end.Using 20 days of membership spending data from a large shopping centre in China,a model was constructed to determine the relationship between the time consumers spent in the shop,their length of stay and the absolute location of the offline retail shop on the associated spending between consumers and brands at the individual consumer level.The study found that,from the perspective of spatial variables,consumers spent less on offline retail shops far away from the entrance of the mall;from the perspective of time variables,the later consumers entered the mall and the longer they stayed,the higher they spent;from the perspective of consumer-brand association,the stronger the consumer’s mall association or the stronger the brand association,both would reduce the amount of this spending on the brand.The interaction of the three dimensional variables further revealed that the time variable counteracted the negative effects of the spatial and association variables,the time and association variables contributed to the positive effects of the spatial variable,and the time and association variables both counteracted the negative effects of each other.In summary,based on theories related to construal level theory,spreading activation theory,assimilation-contrast theory,spillover effect theory and association rules,the impact mechanisms on affiliate sales in offline retail shops are explored in both the temporal and spatial dimensions.This paper introduces both temporal and spatial elements to improve the relevant content of the association sales theory on the basis of the original association sales;the introduction of spatial effects into association sales enriches the relevant theory of association sales.In terms of applied practice,the influence of temporal and spatial factors on consumer behavior helps offline retail shops to effectively conduct affiliate sales;through the study of the spatial effect in retail physical shops,it helps shopping malls and brands to effectively coordinate the distribution of various brands and conduct more effective affiliate sales measures.