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Ten publications (1 book, 9 articles) are presented within the subject area of Retail Franchising. The aim is to demonstrate how this collection of work contributes individually and collectively to a better understanding Retail Franchising as part of Vertical Marketing Systems (VMS) in general, and its use as a growth strategy to expand the business successfully in international markets with differing legal, political, cultural/social, economic development and governance perspectives, as well as its impact on host country development. The significant growth of franchising in a number of developed/developing economies within the last thirty years has led to this business format franchising/retail franchising experiencing a rising importance in a number of academic debates and research. There has been a significant amount of research done on various aspects of franchising in general and international franchising in particular, from 1960s through to 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium. However, in terms of retail franchising and its fit within VMS and specifically its use as a growth strategy internationally with varying political, legal, sOcial/cultural environments, governance issues and market dynamics, there are still only a small number of contributions of any substance and significance. The author's work sits within a body of literature that spans a number of disCiplines. Conceptually franchising can be seen, for example, as a component of the wider areas of VMS, Growth and (specifically) the Internationalization of the Firm and PrincipalAgency theory. VMS had, in the author's opinion, the greater impact on his work and in setting the context for the same, this literature is discussed first. This collection of work brings together theoretical and practical aspects of business format franchising and retail franchising and uses them as an international growth strategy successfully by creating the right balance of 'standardisation' and 'adaptations' in managerial and marketing/operational dimensions without overall dilution of the core ethics of the concept/brand, against varied political, legal, social/cultural and economic development aspects as well as governance issues using a selection of regions/countries around the world. This collection of work demonstrates that the international markets for franchising are not as homogenous as it is assumed by many franchise companies, as well as researchers. There are, as the author's work highlights, a series of often highly distinctive and individualistic national markets with, in some cases, certain areas/aspects of convergence between the markets. From a theoretical point of view, they may even alter the balance between the economics of different growth strategies. From a practical perspective, one of the apparently attractive aspects of franchising, of being able to grow successfully internationally by rolling out exactly the same format/formula/concept, is not as straightforward as earlier work might make it appear.

This thesis studies retailing in Great Britain, but its methods of approach and techniques of analysis may be extended to other countries. International comparisons, however, are notoriously difficult in the distributive trades, for both obvious and more obscure reasons. During the final stages of the compilation of the thesis such comparison has become possible as a result of the work of Jefferys and Knee* (Table A). This note attempts to interpret this standardised data, published in November 1962, in relation to the findings of the thesis as a whole. A major subject of study in this thesis is large shops (high average sales per retail establishment). Jefferys and Knee have suggested that variations between the countries of Europe might be explained in terms of four factors:-(a) The number of inhabitants per establishment.(b) The number of employees per establishment.(c) Private expenditure per capita.(d) The structure of the trade. This thesis has found that in Britain two particular factors account for the distribution of large shops: the importance of medium sized towns in the settlement pattern, and of multiple traders in the retail sales of an area. Diagrams A and B show the relationship of these two factors to the size of shops in those countries of Europe with annual per capita private consumption expenditure of over 415 dollars (the rest of Europe has too dissimilar economic landscapes to make comparison profitable).The relationship between the size of shop and the proportion of the population in towns between 20,000 and 100,000 is close for the countries of Northern Europe. Only three countries are notably divergent, having smaller shop than their urban structure would warrant. These are however Belgium, France and the Netherlands, suggesting that different consumption habits and economic conditions in this part of Europe are important. The second relationship is far less marked. A relationship does however exist if the Scandinavian countries are isolated from the rest of Europe, for in these countries the great importance of Co-operative Retailing makes comparisons based on trade structure somewhat unreal. Austria is an exception for which no ready explanation can be given. A direct relationship between the two variables exists in the cases of the U.K., Switzerland, West Germany, Netherlands, France and Ireland. Jefferys and Knee have given a descriptive account of the variations in the size of shops. If causal explanations are to be found it is essential to examine the geographical pattern of retailing, the towns in which most shopping takes place and where large scale organisations set up their branches. It is clear that in order to explain the regional variations noted above much detailed examination would be needed. The study of retailing is also seen to be relevant to the examination of regional patterns which may not other1vise statistically be apparent.* Jefferys, J .B. and Knee, D. Retailing in Europe: Present Structure and future trends. London 1962.

Brands have become one of the most discussed phenomena in marketing in recent years. The process of brand creation, especially in fashion, is a challenging and complicated matter. Exploration of a wide range of sources on marketing and branding reveals that whilst they discuss a broad-spectrum approach to brand creation they do not cover some of the practical aspects. For example, adaptation to cultural and psychological features characteristic of the population in the target region is often neglected. A particular omission in relation to understanding the China market concerns national brand creation in a country lacking marketing experience and where many younger consumers prefer foreign-made products. With the aim of developing a process model for creating a Chinese fashion brand, this study investigated brand-building literature, evaluated and compared current brandcreation models, determined key Chinese consumer behaviour characteristics and corresponding barriers to creating a brand, interviewed and analysed some of the largest and most successful Chinese fashion brand retailers and compared their experience and practices to the findings from studies of successful Asian companies. Using the outcomes from the Chinese fashion industry survey, the new model has been based on two academically acknowledged branding models but more-closely fits the Chinese fashion market requirements for creating a successful national brand with potential to become international. Key words: brand, brand creation, China, fashion industry

Companies frequently seek to increase market share and/or profit by developing brand extensions that relate to an existing parent brand. However sometimes these brand extensions are different in some ways from the parent and therefore present information that is incongruent with consumers' existing impressions of the brand, which can therefore change consumers' perceptions of the parent brand. Previous research on brand knowledge changes has considered two alternative models of brand knowledge changes: typicalitybased and bookkeeping. These two models lead to opposite predictions regarding the pattern of brand knowledge changes in response to incongruent information presented by the brand extension. The bookkeeping model predicts that j] ..incongruent information causes more changes to the parent, whereas the typicality-based model suggests that j incongruent information causes more changes. However, empirical tests of these theories have not shown conclusively which model is best: some studies support one model, while other studies support the other. The purpose of this dissertation is to reconcile these previous findings by suggesting that different models are likely to be correct depending on the tvne of cognitive processing undertaken by the consumer. This dissertation also notes that different researchers have used different operationalizations of incongruity and explores the effects of these differences by using multiple operationalizations in the same study. Lastly, this dissertation examines the differential sensitivity of two different ways of capturing brand knowledge changes: the strength of associations and the overall attitude towards the brand. The findings suggest that algebraic piecemeal processing (which focuses on the extension's information on its own) leads to a bookkeeping-based pattern of brand knowledge changes. In contrast, thoughtful piecemeal processing, (which focuses on the extension in its relation to the parent brand) leads to a typicality-based pattern of brand knowledge changes. This pattern is shown to be true regardless of the operationalization of incongruity. Furthermore, the different measures are found to be differentially sensitive to certain brand knowledge changes. Therefore, the previously conflicting results can indeed be accounted for by different types of processing, as well as by different measures of brand knowledge changes.

The impact of the Internet technology on global commercial activities is best appreciated when one considers the tremendous rush by many businesses worldwide into online marketing activities since the year 2000. Among other scholars, Bradley and Stewart (2003) noted the highly indispensable ubiquity of the Internet in global retail banking and therefore predicted a near-universal adoption of Internet banking by 2011. Unfortunately, the global banking industry is currently still battling with persistent reluctance of retail customers to adopt the Internet banking channel due to certain factors, made even worse by the global financial crisis and economic recession precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers of the US in September 2008. Two factors, customer readiness and channel readiness, were hypothesised in the current study as potential universal determinants of retail customer adoption of Internet banking (IB). The study involved two identical surveys carried out simultaneously in Scotland and Nigeria to cross-nationally test a proposed model of eight customer readiness variables and eight web-channel readiness variables in order to determine their universality as factors that can motivate or hinder retail customers' IB channel adoption. The sixteen variables were investigated as the possible universal predictors of customers' attitudes and intentions towards IB adoption using a combined adaptation of Davis' (1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Ajzen' (2005) Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). A "mixed-mode method" (Wilson, 2006) was employed in primary data collection including web-based, email and intercept surveys. The comparative statistical analyses of the two national data sets involved the use of SPSS and AMOS for factor analyses as well as scale reliability and model invariance tests in both covariance structure and latent mean structure analyses. The results indicate significant scale reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and model fit for the final, re-specified version of the model. Three customer readiness variables (customer access, customer awareness, and customerprior involvement) and three channel readiness variables (channel ease of use, channel usefulness, and channel convenience) were validated in the final SEM model, which was confirmed as an adequate depiction of the hypothesised causal relationships in the study. Consequent upon the forgoing, this study contributes the validated model, named EQUAEVAL, to consumer behaviour and technology adoption theories in financial services marketing. The EQUAEVAL model represents a proposal for an equal evaluation of both customer and channel characteristics as universal antecedents of retail customer adoption of Internet banking. In terms of managerial implications, the study also contributes the validation of customer access, customer awareness, and customer prior involvement on one hand, and channel ease of use, channel usefulness, and channel convenience on the other hand, as issues that financial institutions anywhere in the world must deal with in order to redress the growing customer reluctance to Internet banking adoption.

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This thesis examines competition in three local markets: homebuilding, estate agency and groceries. It uses and extends the methodology developed by Bresnahan and Reiss in their seminal work in the 1990s, whereby the relationship between market structure and market size is used to evaluate how competition varies with finn numbers. U sing data from the homebuilding market, the rationale for using the Ordered Probit rather than count data alternatives to estimate these models is explored. Contrary to the existing literature, it is shown that the choice of estimator can significantly affect the results. In addition, several extensions to the Bresnahan and Reiss methodology are proposed. Firstly, the model is generalised to allow analysis of the persistence of certain effects as the number of finns in the market increases. It is shown that estate agents are able to profit from price discrimination and market segmentation, even in relatively unconcentrated markets. Secondly, a methodology is proposed to analyse the effects of competition on market expansion by augmenting the model with sales data. It is shown that increased competition between estate agents leads to a transfer of surplus but no increase in the size of the market. Thirdly, the model is extended in two ways to allow for competition between differentiated finns. When finn level data on differentiation is not available, the effect of the scope for differentiation is analysed. It is shown that markets with greater scope for differentiation are more profitable for estate agents. However, as finns can be identified by type, a more strategic approach is used to analyse the competition between different grocery formats. It is shown that small supermarkets, when located near at least one specialist store (e.g. a butcher or baker), negatively affect the profits of large supermarkets; a result that differs from previous studies by competition authorities.

The Libyan economy is highly dependent on oil export revenues, which allied to a small population, makes Libya one of the richest countries in Africa. In order to diversify its sources of income, the government undertook measures to liberalise its economy and foreign trade. The central strategy of enhancing trade and developing the Libyan economy is to integrate with the EU by taking a pro-active part in EU-initiated economic cooperation and integration programmes and treaties, such as the Barcelona Process. This process constitutes an important step towards enhancing the openness of Libya’s economy and creating convergence towards EU economies. The research explores the perceptions of Libyan businessmen on the economic and trade relationship between Libya and the EU by focusing directly on trends, developments, problems and prospects. The research also aims to explore problems encountered between Libya and the EU with the objective of establishing ways in which to lessen the adverse effects. It suggests policy measures to be adopted to improve Libya’s trade and economic relations with the EU. To fulfil its aims and objectives, this study utilised both primary and secondary data. The primary data were collected through a survey questionnaire conducted in Libya, which explored the opinions, perceptions and attitudes of Libyan businessmen towards trade-related issues with the EU. In addition, the secondary data were in the form of published statistical data relating to trade between Libya and the EU. The findings of this study demonstrated that the majority of Libyan businessmen have positive attitude towards economic cooperation and the integration process between Libya and the EU within the EU-Mediterranean Partnership (Barcelona Process) in general, and towards the establishment of FTA in particular. In addition, the majority of Libyan businessmen think that achievements in the economic field were the most successful policy aims within the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, while perceiving the political and military and security fields to be of a minor role. However, the majority consider that trade between Libya and EU still faces a number of obstacles, despite Libya joining the Barcelona Process. These include the high price of EU products, the difference in terms of quality, and the adoption of high customs duties on EU products by the Libyan authorities and the lack of information about the opportunities available in EU markets. The study, also, finds that the majority of Libyan businessmen see the future of Libyan economy tied closely to the EU, rather than in an African, Arab or Islamic Union, in which they show little interest.

The past twenty years have seen an increasing level of importance attached to rapidly growing "high growth firms" (HGFs) within the academic and policy-making communities. However, despite decades of research, our knowledge about how these firms achieve such strong performance remains limited. The literature is dominated by studies seeking to correlate firm characteristics with growth, rather than attempting to explore the nature of rapid firm growth itself. This thesis contributes to the high growth firm literature by exploring the process of rapid firm turnover growth, specifically at the impact that customer perceived value has on firm performance. Drawing on data collected from a large scale questionnaire and Critical Incident Technique interviews, this thesis presents a number of important findings. It identifies the important role played by critical events or key "trigger points" in firm growth and provides a conceptualisation of this firm growth process. This process emphasises that the manner in which a trigger is sensed, seized and managed is of greater significance than the trigger itself. Competencies such as a propensity for risk-taking, a focus on strategic planning and operational flexibility are identified to be of particular importance to successfully capitalise on critical trigger points. This thesis also explores at length firm-level competencies and firm-customer interactions that help to facilitate customer perceived value creation. At the firm-level, the data demonstrates that high growth firms exhibit strongly customer-centric ideologies, significant operational flexibility and a propensity for learning. At the firm-customer interaction level, high growth firms demonstrate significant competencies, such as engaging deeply with customers and participating in co-creation activities. These competencies allow HGFs to have a significant influence on customer perceived value creation, which in turn has a positive effect on firm performance through higher repeat purchases and referrals. These competencies differentiate HGFs from their more moderately-performing counterparts.