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The study of behavior within an urban area, important to retail location research and studies of product purchase behavior, includes essential managerial, conceptual, and methodological issues. The managerial issue is the discovery of relationships between urban socioeconomic structure and market behavior that are useful to decision makers; the conceptual issue is the assumption of a particular environment-market response relationship; and the methodological issue is the choice of a technique that produces viable results from the managerial, conceptual, and statistical viewpoints. In this paper, cluster analysis is applied to the study of urban socioeconomic structure and then assessed for managerial and conceptual viability. Our purpose is threefold: (1) to show methodologically that such clustering can be done; (2) to show that results have at least face validity; and (3) to suggest implications for the study of retail location and product purchase behavior. METHOD

may vary in their susceptibility to group influence. However, the similarity of brand choice measure used in the study precluded specific consideration of this question. Evaluation of the group influence-purchase behavior relationships discussed in other recent studies reveals that they vary substantially in strength among types of purchase decisions as well as among determinants of group influence [2, 5, 6].

Several specific effects of various social groups on consumer behavior have been studied. Venkatesan demonstrated experimentally that individuals' product choices may be affected by conformity and reactance in small face-to-face groups [10]. Stafford [9] and Witt [11] found that small primary groups influence certain brand choice decisions, and Bourne suggested that the purchase of certain types and brands of products may be influenced by a person's reference group [1]. However, there is a significant gap in knowledge about the effects on consumer behavior of the socially distant reference group.'

Ecology is the point of departure for explaining variations in retail structures of large American cities. Hierarchical grouping cluster analysis is used to construct empirical city types, among which differences are examined. Implications for marketing theory, market analysis, and retail location are discussed.

Purchase decisions are made in and influenced by their social environment [1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8]. In our recent study [9], for example, it was found that group influence affects brand choice differently for different products and that brand choice congruence within groups varies significantly among test products. For products high in social involvement (e.g., cigarettes, beer), the power of group cohesiveness in predicting brand choice was greater than for products low in social involvement (e.g., deodorant). Thus, the study indicated that differences in the explanatory power of group cohesiveness are rooted symbolically in the nature of the product and the interpersonal situation in which it is used. These findings, with respect to the effect of symbolic product involvement in interpersonal interaction, suggest that investigations of group influence on brand choice should focus on both the symbolic nature of the product and group structure and decision processes. This exploratory study sought an explanation of group influence through a consideration of both. Correlates of group influence were examined in seven product contexts.