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What is retail?

Published on October 29, 2026   14 min

A selection of talks on Marketing & Sales

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0:00
Hello. My name is John Talbott. I teach marketing and retail at the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University. I'd like to introduce you to my series of talks about effective retail management.
0:14
What are we going to talk about today? First of all, I want to tell you a little bit more about my background and my research. I found that, though many of us know the term retail, many people don't really understand the origins of retail and really what retailers do, so I want to talk a bit about that. I want to also talk about whether there's a clear methodology that we could use to distinguish retail from other types of industries. I want to give you some examples of retail brands and really ask you as the listener or the viewer to guess with me which ones are retailers and which aren't. Then we'll talk a bit about the scale of the retail industry and then wrap this talk up.
0:57
So, I'm John Talbott, as I stated, Professor of marketing at Indiana University's Kelly School of Business. We're the Number 3 ranked marketing program in the United States. I've been teaching about marketing since 2007, but prior to that, I spent about 30 years as a retailer and started in the building which is the old boys' club behind my house. I was a night manager there. I had to take money to the bank, and learned quite a bit about retail. My first job out of college was also in retail and I worked for an upscale department store in Dallas, Texas. I spent a short time there and then moved to a sales position with a children's clothing company that sold to both specialty retailers and department stores. I got promoted within that company and spent about 13 years in product development and marketing and had the opportunity to travel all over the world in distribution relationships, also in factories to learn how apparel necessaries were made. Then finally before taking my position in academia, I was actually CEO of the largest Western practitioner in the United States in retail. In these talks, what I hope you'll see is a blend of both theory and practice, and I hope you find them enjoyable and interesting and useful in terms of understanding effective retail management.

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