ABSTRACT
This book presents, with just two exceptions, the contributions made to a workshop on 'Methods of retail analysis and forecasting' held at the University of Bristol, in February 1986, and sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together researchers from both academic institutions and commercial firms to discuss techniques of analysis and forecasting in the fields of store choice, store location, store performance assessment, and market analysis. Its rationale lay in the major restructuring of the UK retailing industry which has taken place over the past twenty years, and in the profound implications of that restructuring for the nature and organisation of the research which is necessary to understilnd, maintain or enhance corporate profitability. These concerns informed the wide-ranging discussion which took place at the workshop, and they provide a common, but often implicit, agenda for all the chapters in this book. To capture some of this common agenda, and to place the individual chapters into a wider context, this introduction will consider, first, the nature of the retail restructuring in the UK and, second, the research imperatives which this restructuring implies for the techniques of retail analysis and forecasting used in the commercial sector.
