Routes to Market

Introduction

Country towns can often provide attractive and distinctive visitor locations for urban residents. Attracting urban visitors can help alleviate problems of maintaining trade for their town centers. Despite this potential, little is known about how urban residents view country towns and what they find attractive. Through the use of focus groups and questionnaire surveys, the research demonstrates the key attraction of country towns to be that of providing something different from the city in terms of history, tradition and shopping. An important element of this attraction is the socially constructed meaning of the term market town, which reflects the size, history and tradition of these towns as well as their rural hinterland linkages. Indeed, visitor rates were highest for the most typical market towns. This is particularly reflected in shopping patterns, where there are expectations in terms of local food and crafts. Owing to the need for most towns to maintain their core local trade, the paper has also considered the consistency of efforts to encourage both urban visitors with resident populations. Although there are some parallels, particularly where people have moved to country towns in order to experience their ‘different from the city' character, care must be taken to balance the potential of attracting urban residents and that of maintaining the rural service centre functional role (Powe, 2006). For example the growing economy in middle-eastern countries like Saudi Arabia positively developed the country’s overall living standards and increased the purchasing powers of many consumers to new levels. Saudis have been more interested in acquiring luxury goods, the latest technology and other non-essential products that they previously viewed as extras. Such growth in non-grocery retailing has increased sales to new levels, higher than those of grocery. Retailers are spending large proportions of their marketing campaigns on the different marketing channels, both physical and online, to target this group. Retailers believe that this group is easier to convince into a device change, upgrade, and trial. Despite the fact that young Saudis often have limited to no income and their spending habits are not organized, they spend more on their wants than on their needs.

Urban shopping environments demonstrate new opportunities and challenges for retailers and shoppers. Retailers in urban locations attempt to both attract shoppers and retain them in their immediate trade areas. In this way both retailers and shoppers understand the dynamics of competitive advantages to shop in urban retailing settings. Such shopping behavior of consumers is mostly observed during the holiday season that fills enormous stimuli for leisure shopping (Smith, 1999). Growing shopping motivations have induced the basket shopping behavior over branded shopping traits among urban consumers. The basket shopping may be defined as a kind of compulsive shopping led by the sales promotions offered by the retailers (Guy, 2007). Basket shopping attitude of urban shoppers is also an outgrowth of store checkout buying decision due to the point of purchase promotions in the retail stores. There is a general belief that products bought at store checkouts are selected on hasty inclinations. However, not all checkout purchases can casually be referred to as impulsive because what items shoppers select at checkouts indicate conscious concern with making efficient use of their shopping time (Miranda, 2008). Coca-Cola FEMSA Costa Rica remained the leading player in carbonates in Costa Rica in 2013, accounting for an off-trade value share of 68% in 2013. Remarkable marketing campaigns and launches gave its products a further boost. Coca-Cola FEMSA also benefited from its consolidated distribution networks and economy-of-scale logistics in terms of production whilst taking advantage of its top-of-mind brand recognition to keep penetrating the emerging marketing channels linked to social media like Facebook, Twitter, sponsored blogs and campaigns (Euromonitor, 2014).