Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One by David R. Bell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One by David R. Bell Mingshu Wang Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One David R. Bell. New Harvest, distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA, July 15, 2014. 240pp.; maps, diagrs., photos, bibliog., and index. $26.00 cloth. (ISBN 978-0-544-26227-0) Dr. David Bell’s fundamental argument across the book is that our physical locations and environments largely shape the way we use the Internet, particularly our online shopping behaviors. He asserts this claim directly in the book’s introduction, claiming that “if you and I live under different physical circumstances and in different physical environments, we will use the virtual world very differently— even if we are very similar people in terms of our ages, incomes, education levels and so on. We’ll shop differently, search differently and won’t be equally attractive to sellers.” (p. 4). In support of this claim, Bell’s book is organized into six major chapters, with the first two chapters serving to lay down foundations followed by three chapters that closely examine the impacts of three particular locational conditions (i.e. adjacency, vicinity and isolation). The book’s final chapter offers a conclusion and looks towards the future. The first chapter, titled “Geography”, sets the foundation of the book by demonstrating how the physical world dictates purchasing behaviors at different scales (i.e. individual, neighborhood, and country levels). Zipf’s law in urban systems and Walter Christaller’s central place theory are used to illustrate such ideas. The second chapter, “Resistance”, involves a discussion of how the Internet mitigates restrictions posed by geographical constraints but, concurrently, how it poses its own constraints. The geographical areas that we live in determine our favor of one brand over that brand’s close competitor; residents of smaller, remote, and homogenous locations are more likely to use the [End Page 476] Internet for shopping than residents of larger, more urban, and more diverse locations. In such places, those residents often use the Internet more as a source of information. Hence, the physical world and the virtual world both compete against and complement each other in marketing environments. In Chapter 3, the author coins the word adjacency to convey the idea of Tobler’s First Law of Geography (i.e. everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.) to explain consumption behaviors. The underlying mechanisms behind such spatial autocorrelation include the homophily effect—households that form the same areas usually share the same socioeconomic status and accessibility to stores— and the contagion effect—we learn about the product/service from people around us. Then the contributing roles of population density, offline establishment of face-to-face interactions, community homogeneity, and neighborhood cohesion are also discussed. Chapter 4 supplements Chapter 3 by introducing the concept of vicinity to capture similarities in social distance (i.e. locations afar may be socioeconomically clustered together due to similar demographic, cultural, and economic ties). While adjacency shows that Internet behaviors are shaped by proximate individuals with shared physical locations (neighborhood effects), vicinity suggests that Internet behaviors are also shaped by social location, that is, when individuals share characteristics and preferences whether they are geographically located near to or far from each other (social contagion). In Chapter 5, Bell focuses on preference isolation—the challenge of satisfying minority consumer tastes due to local sellers catering to the preferences of the local majority—as an opportunity for Internet sellers to make a difference. In other words, “Isolation offline becomes liberation online” (p. 152). The book’s concluding chapter draws together the previous chapters to ground a discussion of how social capital and word of mouth are used as bridges to fill the gap between physical and virtual marketing environments effectively. It is also interesting that the author uses a broader concept of topography as “the arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features of the area” (p. 153) to capture the coalescence of the physical virtual...