An empirical investigation of supermarket differentiation

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Shopping at supermarkets plays an important role in our all lives. Food consumption increased immensely over the past decades and transferred food retailing into a potential and profitable market especially for big supermarket chains in the UK. However this has been realised not only by a few enterprises, thus food retailing became a challenging and demanding business in a high competitive environment. In correlation with these facts the first question that comes in mind is how can all these supermarkets compete successfully and defend their market position?. It is generally agreed that competitive advantage is necessary for companies to be successful. Mintzberg explains that supermarkets have represented successful generic strategies in the past but they must go beyond this generic strategy and find a way of competing in this business. With this background differentiation turns out as a current problem in the field of food retailing. Above all, plenty of theories of competitive advantage for manufacturers exist but retailing is still a sparely investigated field. Furthermore food retailers in the UK are operating in a high competitive industry more than every other European country and Cox & Brittain describe grocery retailing in the UK as an interesting field of competitive battles. Thus, theories are applied especially to supermarkets in the UK. Hence, this study focuses on the largest supermarket chains in the UK and the role and importance of differentiation in the field of competitive advantage is investigated and questioned. Academic objectives of the dissertation: The objective of this dissertation is to enrich the profound and wide field of competitive advantage with new findings. With the investigation of differentiation in food retailing a so far scarce analysed but complex topic is enlightened. During the exploration of the literature it became apparent that differentiation strategies are only of value for companies when differences between companies or brands add value to customers. Hence, customer perception creates a further main part of the literature review and the research. An empirical study with customers is conducted to highlight the customer perception of differentiation strategies in the UK food retail industry. The aim of the study is to reveal to what dimensions customer perception can influence differentiation strategies. The end result of primary research will rectify whether theory and [...]