Competitive Convergence in Grocery Retailing

The new economic scenario and the fundamental shifts in consumer needs have generated significant changes on the retail food landscape. Grocery retailers are developing new store formats aimed to capture the competitor's customers and expand their target market. Discounters are improving the quality of the services to compete with the supermarkets, while supermarkets and hypermarkets are developing lower pricing policies to compete with discounters. New "hybrid" formats are emerging as a consequence of the "trading up" and "trading down" policies. These trends suggest that the patterns of competition among store formats are more complex than in the past. Convergence affects retail patronage, since consumers are changing the way to use various grocery retail formats to satisfy their needs. The book provides grocery retailers a specific knowledge of the attributes that consumers consider to be most important when making grocery store choice and suggests retailers which levers they should manage in order to be perceived differentiated from competitors and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.