Retailing in the 21st Century : Current and Future Trends

Retailing in the new millennium stands as an exciting, complex and critical sector of business in most developed as well as emerging economies. Today, the retailing industry is being buffeted by a number of forces simultaneously, e.g., increasing competition within and across retailing formats, the growth of online retailing, the advent of ‘radio frequency identification’ (RFID) technology, the explosion in customer-level data availability, the global expansion of major retail chains like Wal-Mart and METRO Group and so on. Making sense of it all is not easy but of vital importance to retailing practitioners, analysts and policymakers. With crisp and insightful contributions from some of the world’s leading experts, Retailing in the 21st Century is a compendium of state-of-the-art, cutting-edge knowledge for successful retailing today.

Manfred Krafft holds the Chair of Marketing at the University of Muenster, Germany. He is also director of the Center for Interactive Marketing and Media Management (CIM). Professor Krafft has published articles in Interfaces, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Recherche et Application en Marketing and Marketing Science. For one of his papers he won the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science's Practice Prize in 2003. Professor Krafft serves on several editorial boards.

Murali Mantrala is the Sam M. Walton Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of Missouri. He has published articles in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Marketing Letters, Interfaces, Managerial and Decision Economics and European Journal of Operational Research and serves on the editorial review board of Marketing Science. Professor Mantrala recently spent several years as a Manager with ZS Associates Inc., a sales and marketing strategy consulting firm, with clients in the pharmaceutical, insurance and broadcast media industries.