Competitive Strategies in Retailing in Emerging Economies: Evidence from Turkey

Introduction

Gaining competitive advantage is crucial for companies to have high customer retention rates and increase market share. In this context, retailers have started to implement new strategies to differentiate themselves and achieve competitive advantage. Experiential retailing is one of the most visible strategies from the customers’ side. For example, companies such as; Starbucks, Apple with Apple stores and Tchibo are successfully providing positive experiences to their customers. Retailers also invest on green marketing applications to draw attention of green consumers in order to increase their green image. The green retailing refers to thinking of environment when implementing retail investments in retail business. Another strategy of fair trade has been much exploited by many companies to attract social conscious consumers in recent years under the social marketing strategy. In retail stores, consumers are attracted towards products such as fair trade coffees, bananas, fruit juices. Many companies also invest on customer loyalty programs to retain their customers in the competitive marketplace. With providing some gifts and discounts, customers are urged to purchase from their current retailers. In terms of pricing, expiration dated-based pricing as a new strategy is also used by some grocery retailers as a discount strategy to attract specifically price conscious consumers.

In addition, new innovative and creative forms of retail formats have emerged in the market place. For instant, some retailers have opened their pop-up stores as a part of new communication and distribution strategy. Pop-up stores are temporary format of a retailer which is usually situated in mostly visible places in the cities with small buildings to attract consumers’ attention with innovative and creative design. Due to the technological developments, many retailers also benefit from self-service technologies such as retail checkouts, mobile banking, online reservation and payments to increase satisfaction and deliver high service quality. And also, using Quick Response Code (QR code), companies conveniently deliver information about their products and services via mobile devices. This chapter explains and discusses aforementioned competitive strategies of retailing sector. The various strategies are discussed along with their advantages and national and international examples of each strategy. At the end of this chapter, conclusion and managerial implications are presented.