نوع درونی رقابت : رقابت تخصصی فروشگاههای مواد غذایی با سوپر مارکت ها

Empirical findings are presented in this paper concerning the competitiveness of specialty food stores when competing with supermarkets. Taking both a specialty food store-oriented perspective and a consumer-oriented perspective, the obtained results of two quantitative studies suggest that specialty food store managers’ and consumers’ evaluation of the importance of various store choice factors are quite similar. Additionally, specialty food store managers show highly positive expectations towards future intertype competition with supermarkets.

The development of competitive advantage is one of the main challenges which food stores is facing. In fact, retailing in general has been regarded as one of the most dynamic and competitive areas of business organization (Collins, 1992; Leszczyc et al., 2000). While food is essential to life consumers cannot consume unlimited amounts of food. Facing a near-saturated market, being the case in most Western countries, retailers seek to find ways to differentiate themselves from other retailers and thereby creating preference, or even loyalty, towards their own outlets. In short, retailers are aiming for competitive advantages. A competitive advantage can be defined as “a unique position which a firm develops vis-á-vis its competitors through its patterns of resource deployments and/or scope of decisions” (Hofer and Schendel, 1978, p. 25). A retailer obtains a competitive advantage by offering consumers a considerable ‘service-output’ at a given cost, as compared to competing retailers. Two types of competitive interaction among retailers are most commonly identified (Ingene, 1983; Miller et al., 1999; Levy and Weitz, 2001): (1) Intratype competition, which refers to competition between the same type of outlets (e.g., a specialty food store competing with another specialty food store). (2) Intertype competition, which refers to competition between different types of outlets (e.g., a specialty food store competing with a supermarket). This paper deals with the second type of competition. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how specialty food stores compete with supermarkets. Towards this end, we consider the following problem areas: are there correspondence between the importance assigned by specialty food store managers and consumers to various store choice factors (Baker and Hart, 1989; Hildebrandt, 1988); what are managers’ intended image of specialty food stores and what is the image as perceived by consumers; and how competitive are specialty food stores in future intertype competition with supermarkets? The purpose of this study is approached from both a specialty food store-oriented perspective and a consumer-oriented perspective: The total service-output of a specialty food store would include factors such as the location of the shop, information about the shop and its products, assortment, customization of products, product quality, etc. None of these, or other factors, should be excluded beforehand as having potential for gaining ‘competitive advantages’. The competitiveness of specialty food stores when participating in intertype competition with supermarkets can therefore be regarded as an abstract concept which in itself does not provide much information about the critical success factors of specialty food stores. Instead, a distillation of the concept has to be made in order to provide more specific information about the factors which specialty food stores considers as being important for their competitiveness. However, whether the perceived critical success factors of specialty food store managers are sufficient for competing in the food market depends highly on the importance attached by consumers to these critical factors when choosing among different types of food-outlets. In consequence of these considerations, two quantitative studies were conducted. The first study elicits specialty food store managers’ opinions of their critical success factors and of their estimated future competitiveness when competing with supermarkets. This study encompasses four types of specialty food stores. The second study elicits consumers’ assessments of the most important store choice factors when deciding whether to choose a specialty food store or a supermarket. This paper takes its point of departure in the Danish retailing. The historical development in Danish retailing has in general terms been close to the historical development in the rest of the Western countries. Like in most other Western countries there has been a decrease in the number of food outlets complemented by a larger geographical and economical concentration of retailers. The results obtained in this study might therefore also be of interest to retailers and academics in other Western countries. This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, a review of the present intertype competitive position of specialty food stores is conducted. Also, an overview of the Danish food retail structure is provided. In Section 3, four research questions are established, as is the methodology used. The results of the two empirical studies are presented in Section 4. Section 5 discusses the implications of the obtained results and provides suggestions for further research. In Section 6 some concluding remarks are proposed.

While specialty food stores have been reduced by numbers the remaining stores have increased their gross profit ratio. Also, there is to a large degree correspondence between the factors considered by specialty food store managers to be the most important intertype competition factors and the factors considered by consumers to be the most important for choosing a specialty food store instead of a supermarket. Moreover, consumers’ perceived image of specialty food stores correspond to store managers’ intended store image. Finally, specialty food store managers show very positive expectations towards future intertype competition with supermarkets. Thus, the results of this study seem to indicate that the days of specialty food stores are not yet over.