Читать книгу Location-Based Marketing - Gérard Cliquet - Страница 20

The introduction of space in marketing studies implies taking distance into account. Just because we regularly talk about the digital economy, which no longer has a border, does not mean that there is no longer any distance or that everything has been globalized, thus eliminating any local specificity. On the contrary, we are witnessing a real resurgence of the local.

On a more methodological level, distance is a complex variable. A distinction is made between geographical distance and temporal distance: the law of gravity of retail trade uses geographical distance when Huff’s model favors temporal distance. However, the geographical distance is difficult to manipulate. Purely metric distance is only rarely considered, especially in the behavior of out-of-store consumers. Since they travel with their vehicles, or by public transport, the temporal distance (Brunner and Mason 1968) is preferred by researchers and analysts. But it is no more satisfactory, because consumers, like all decision-makers, make their decisions not according to reality, but according to their perception of it. This can probably be partly attributed to bounded rationality (Simon 1955). Under these conditions, the perceived distance should be preferred despite methodological problems (Cliquet 1990, 1995).

With regard to internationalization, companies are not immune to problems related to culture, among other things. The so-called Uppsala model (Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul 1975) underlines the influence of psychological distance to explain the difficulties of export companies. This psychological distance is broken down into geographical, economic, cultural and institutional distances (see Chapter 2).