Building Successful Indian Brands
Building Successful Indian Brands by Sundar
Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Trichy
Building Successful Indian Retail Brands
Contributed By
Sundar,
Asst.Professor/Marketing
Bharathidasan Institute of Management
Building Successful Indian Brands by Sundar
Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Trichy
The Global Retail Scenario
Large format retail businesses dominate the retail landscape in the United States and across Europe, in terms of retail space, categories, range, brands, and volumes. Indian retail industry cannot hope to learn much by merely looking at the Western success stories in retail. Their scales of operations are very huge, the profit margins that they earn are also much higher and they operate in multiple formats like discount stores, warehouses, supermarkets, departmental stores, hyper-markets, convenience stores and specialty stores.. The economy and lifestyle of the West is not in line with that of India and hence the retailing scene in India has not evolved in the same format as the West nor can we learn valuable lessons from their style of operations.
In retailing, the conventional wisdom used to be, that, the critical success factor was location. But precise location no longer matters and geo-demographics is increasingly becoming irrelevant. The leading multiple chain retailers, superstores and malls create their own centers of gravity, attracting customers by car, bus, train or even by plane to wherever they are located.
The growth of multiple chain retailers has been relentless for many years in the west and this has been accompanied by the development of retail names as brands in their own right. Discount retailer Walmart has catapulted to the top of the Fortune 500 rankings in the U.S. with a turnover of $258 billions (2003 revenues – the basis for 2004 rankings), ahead even of oil major Exxon Mobil and the mammoth manufacturing giant General
Electric. A ruthless policy, of, ‘Always Low prices. Always.’
Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Trichy
Building Successful Indian Retail Brands
Contributed By
Sundar,
Asst.Professor/Marketing
Bharathidasan Institute of Management
Building Successful Indian Brands by Sundar
Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Trichy
The Global Retail Scenario
Large format retail businesses dominate the retail landscape in the United States and across Europe, in terms of retail space, categories, range, brands, and volumes. Indian retail industry cannot hope to learn much by merely looking at the Western success stories in retail. Their scales of operations are very huge, the profit margins that they earn are also much higher and they operate in multiple formats like discount stores, warehouses, supermarkets, departmental stores, hyper-markets, convenience stores and specialty stores.. The economy and lifestyle of the West is not in line with that of India and hence the retailing scene in India has not evolved in the same format as the West nor can we learn valuable lessons from their style of operations.
In retailing, the conventional wisdom used to be, that, the critical success factor was location. But precise location no longer matters and geo-demographics is increasingly becoming irrelevant. The leading multiple chain retailers, superstores and malls create their own centers of gravity, attracting customers by car, bus, train or even by plane to wherever they are located.
The growth of multiple chain retailers has been relentless for many years in the west and this has been accompanied by the development of retail names as brands in their own right. Discount retailer Walmart has catapulted to the top of the Fortune 500 rankings in the U.S. with a turnover of $258 billions (2003 revenues – the basis for 2004 rankings), ahead even of oil major Exxon Mobil and the mammoth manufacturing giant General
Electric. A ruthless policy, of, ‘Always Low prices. Always.’
References: 1. Pearson Stewart (1996) Building Brands Directly, Macmillan Press, London. 3. Crane Tony ( 2004) ‘Battling the price chasm’, The Ashridge 360o Jounal. 4. van Tongeren Michel (2002) Retail branding/Platform Development: The holistic approach to retail branding. 5. Christopher Knee (2002) Learning from experience: five challenges for retailers, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, Vol.30 No 6. Tony Kent (2003) Management and design perspectives on retail branding, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, Vol.31 No.3, pp.