Home > Sample essays > The Importance of Location for Waterstones: A Consumer's Perspective

Essay: The Importance of Location for Waterstones: A Consumer's Perspective

Essay details and download:

  • Subject area(s): Sample essays
  • Reading time: 4 minutes
  • Price: Free download
  • Published: 1 February 2018*
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 945 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 4 (approx)

Text preview of this essay:

This page of the essay has 945 words. Download the full version above.



Waterstones is a British book retailer that was established in 1982 that has a count of 275 stores and 3,500 staff nationwide.

I have selected the Birmingham based store, situated in the Bullring, as my topic of discussion for this essay.Themes will be explored that I have extracted from my own experience as a consumer within Waterstones.  

The location element of the retail mix will be the focal point of this essay, as I believe it is the most important factor at play in the success of the store in question. A strategy will then be recommended on the basis of this reflection and analysis.

Waterstones have clearly chosen their ‘city location’ for two distinct reasons. The ‘proximity to customers'(measured in travel time) and ‘agglomeration’ can either be beneficial or detrimental depending on the nature of the shop (Fox et al, 2007). For Waterstones I believe both are beneficial.

Many customers likely visit Waterstones as part of a trip to multiple other shops within the confines of the Bullring, and could thus be characterized as a ‘parasite’ shop. Store agglomeration is highlighted as being important for multi-shop shopping trips (Brooks et al,2008). This is important because consumers value their time (Becker, 1965). This footfall will likely increase visitors, sales, and thus profit.

Waterstones is unlikely to be able to match the economies of scale, distribution networks, and thus cost-efficiency of the likes of online booksellers such as Amazon. Whilst Waterstones is utilizing an omni-channel approach, it is likely capitalizing on its physical locations; something that some research has suggested can hold an advantage over online approaches in some product categories (Keen et al. 2004).

The location decision likely has major ramifications for price, promotion, and merchandising decisions (Dhruv Grewal et al, 2009). A prime location can reduce the need for promotional spending and thus reduce the importance of the communication mix for Waterstones.  Prices will likely be higher to make up for the additional high costs associated with location.

To make up for this, Waterstones adds this additional value through the integration of a Costa within the store (known as a ‘store-within-a-store’). Customers are given the convenience to be able to handle books and to sit and relax at their leisure, something online bookstores fail to offer. A coffee shop has the advantages of complementing Waterstones service, without running the risk of cannibalization.

Waterstones encourages their customers to relax, sit down, and read. It presents itself like a library, thus likely activating the same mental schemas (Brewer et al, 1981), and thus increases ‘dwell time’. Waterstones has a ‘click and collect’ option, something that is highly valuable to shoppers when paired with a convenient location.

Waterstones has free Wi-Fi in store. Wi-Fi means that purchases may be made at the retailer's online site, however increasingly they are being made at competitors’ sites (Vakayil, Sunil, 2017). Waterstones cannot compete on price with the likes of Amazon.

‘Bundling’ items allows retailers to make value comparison more difficult. This is something that Waterstones in the Bullring are already doing with their ‘book collections’. Cross-selling can be deployed as a formal, systematic strategy to engage showroomers (Tuttle, 2012)

Shoppers visiting Waterstones may search for information in store, whilst searching for a better deal online (Peter C et al). This is known as ‘showrooming’. This pattern of behavior reduces in-store purchases; and a knock on effect of this is that in store staff can feel more demotivated and experience ‘job insecurity’ (Sharma et al, 2009) or what Bandura (1997) calls ‘declining self-efficacy’.

It is clear that online competitors are in a much stronger position to beat Waterstones in the ‘price’ element of the marketing mix due to their lower cost of not having a physical location. They’re also in a better position for the communications mix element because of their available budgets and online presence.

Waterstones must target: ‘location (which includes store design and display)’, ‘merchandise’, and ‘customer service’.

Specifically I recommend that Waterstones focus on the experiential qualities of visiting their stores. The existing base of highly knowledgeable staff should be utilized to its full effect with personalization in the form of personal recommendations to store visitors. This is something to be concerned about in the future however, as Amazon improves its machine-learning book recommendations.

Customer service for Waterstones is key because it is the only element of the mix that can facilitate a true sustainable competitive advantage as it is difficult to imitate. Word of mouth will also likely increase, and customer referrals will likely lead to a reduction in the required spend on the communications mix.

More events should be held at the store, with a focus on exclusivity such as Q&A events with handpicked authors.   

Merchandise management should be a focal point of the strategy, in particular- providing a wider range of available books than competitors. This has been termed as ‘winning by dominant assortment’ by Willard N. Ander et al (2004). I also recommend that Waterstones attempts to protect their offering with exclusive rights to certain publications.

It has been highlighted by salespeople that they can often use their “in-depth knowledge to keep a sale” in the presence of showrooming (Rapp et al, 2015).

Amazon is already branching out into physical locations. Given this trend, Waterstones should adopt more positions on high-street locations so that strong barriers to entry exist in the market. This means that it is essential that Waterstones not only focuses on the location, but on the experiential qualities of the location- moving as far away from a simple transaction as possible.

Waterstones should engage in a market penetration strategy- attempting to decrease ‘show-rooming’ with existing customers and gain more customers in their target segment whilst prompting loyalty with experiential value.

...(download the rest of the essay above)

About this essay:

If you use part of this page in your own work, you need to provide a citation, as follows:

Essay Sauce, The Importance of Location for Waterstones: A Consumer's Perspective. Available from:<https://www.essaysauce.com/sample-essays/2017-12-8-1512702047/> [Accessed 29-03-24].

These Sample essays have been submitted to us by students in order to help you with your studies.

* This essay may have been previously published on Essay.uk.com at an earlier date.