“In France, a Drive-Up Grocery Takes Off”
Posted by Joe CannonPeople have long predicted that online shopping and home delivery of groceries would change the market. Another wrong prediction (see Webvan go down in flames) — and of course they said no one could sell shoes online (tell that to Zappos). Anyway, I digress. This January 14, 2010, Wall Street Journal article, “In France, a Drive-Up Grocery Takes Off” (subscription may be required - for “back door” see here) describes a French retailers hybrid version — online order then pick-up. Would this model work in other cultures? Or is it uniquely French?
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Consumer behavior, International, Place, Retailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
I don’t like this new format for the Marketing newletters. Some of these articles cannot be read because you have to subscribe to whatever link you are looking at. The original format of looking at abstracts was nice because it contained the full abstract and the chapters in the book that the article pertained to. It also contained questions that you could ask your students with the answers. Could you offer the original format for the newsletters?
January 28th, 2010 at 9:48 amThanks for your interest in the Teach the 4 Ps newsletter. Can I assume that all your comments have to do with the e-mailed version of the newsletter – and not the blog? Our newsletter has only had four issues – starting in October – and I have not consciously tried to change the format (with the exception of dropping the chapter numbers in favor of topics). I am also not sure if perhaps you are confusing our newsletter with another you might be receiving.
The newsletter has become a real challenge to put together, so I sought a few ways to make it more efficient. First, I wanted to create a forum where people could interact about the articles – which is why I developed the blog. I also figured that it was a lot easier for people to search a blog (database) for articles because they could search on topics. I dropped the chapter numbering because it was confusing some people – it was hard to search on Basic Marketing chapter 8 which is actually Essentials of Marketing Chapter 7. So I decided to use topics – for example those are both Marketing Research chapters in our books. The topics make it much easier to search the blog for relevant content.
Second, I had not intended to change the format of my abstracts, but after your comment I realized that my comments are shorter. I think that is because I felt that if people were on the blog – they could more quickly click through to see the actual article. So there was less need for an “abstract.” I had not figured that this is a weakness for readers of the “print” version. I will try to create a bit more detailed abstracts moving forward to try to address that. I looked at the earlier newsletters and a few of my posting suggested 1-2 questions that might stimulate in-class discussion. But these have always been less than a quarter of the articles – and I have tried to maintain that ratio but maybe I fell off. I will try to add a bit more, but at this point it is very difficult for me to do this on each article. I am sorry about that. Is it possible you are confusing our newsletter with another one – because we never provided questions and actual answers?
Third, I have actually moved away from subscription based articles since my first issues of the newsletter. We have always included a few Wall Street Journal articles – with the warning that if you were not a subscriber you would have to do an online search for the article title and this would give you a “back door” to the article. I have almost completely dropped the AdAge articles that were in the first couple of issues of the newsletter because you had to subscribe. So in contrast with the first two editions of the newsletter the more recent versions actually contain fewer subscription articles. This again makes me wonder if you are perhaps confusing our newsletter with another you might receive.
January 28th, 2010 at 1:27 pm