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Illustrates the reasons that have determined the success or failure of the discount retailers on the international scene, through the identification and analysis of the strategic groups, competitive advantages, entry barriers to the sector and barriers to mobility between the groups. Three strategic groups of discount food retailers that have adopted different internationalisation strategies have been defined and a series of key success factors of the different strategic groups has been identified. The winners in the race to international expansion are in particular the leaders of the first group of German hard discount retailers. But important niches in several foreign markets can also enable growth of retailers in the second group, the German soft discount retailers specialised abroad, and of the third group, the French soft discount retailers diversified abroad.

Looks at the development of Carrefour‐Primodès and Wal‐Mart, the world current leaders in terms of turnover and employment. Presents seven issues of particular interest to leading managers and researchers and examines how these are dealt with by the two leaders. Concludes that Wal‐Mart and Carrefour present two different models which stand in opposition on many points, and questions whether a convergence of the two will not result in a perfect model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of participative franchising on performance from the franchisee perspective. In particular, the paper analyses the impact of the franchisee autonomy – in human resource management and marketing decisions – affective commitment to the network and network innovativeness on the franchisee relative performance.

A survey answered by 226 franchisees in France allowed to estimate a structural equations model through partial least squares regression analysis to test the hypothesised relations between autonomy, affective commitment, innovativeness and performance.

According to the authors’ findings, franchisee’s autonomy in commercial policies, mediated by to franchisor’s ability to innovate and acknowledge innovations stemming from the franchisees, and the affective commitment to the network, emerge as strong determinants of the franchisee’s performance.

The results confirm the conclusions of other research, but extend and integrate them, providing evidence that the role of participative franchising should not be neglected.

The results obtained provide evidence about the importance of bidirectional communication instruments in the relations between franchisor and franchisee, and participation tools for the identification, recognition and support to the innovative successful practices developed by franchisees to be quickly implemented by other franchisees in the network.

This paper looks at franchisee autonomy, affective commitment and innovativeness as potential determinants of franchisee’s performance, being the latter an underexplored topic.

In France, the consumer prices of major industrial brands have been rising for a number of years, while the price differential between these brands and the retailers' ones has widened. These consequences were attributed to the French legislation, particularly to the Galland Act, enacted in 1996, which regulated the banning of below cost resale. The aim of this paper is to explain the effects of the legislation on price competition within the grocery sector and to analyse the effects of the Dutreil Act, enacted in 2005, which modified the Galland Act.

The paper carried out an analysis of economic, strategic and marketing literature, as well as professional surveys, statistical data, balance sheets of the main retail groups and the authors did some interviews with retail and industry professionals.

This paper highlights the fact that, although price competition has been partially restored by the Dutreil Act (2005), the latter still has had some very negative consequences on industry/distribution relationships, on negotiations and on development of retailers' expertise. According to the authors, the same consequences will continue in the future, even after the new Chatel Act enactment (December 2007), unless the government will modify the existing regulation of negotiations.

The empirical data that would enable an evaluation of the impact of the legislation – such as retail prices and gross margins of different kinds of brands and retail formats, specially the size of merchandising and promotion fees (marges arrières) – are limited (and some of them controversial). Moreover, the explanation given in the paper is not sufficient to distinguish the inflationary impact of the legislation from that of other factors, which may have contributed to the same effect.

The main value of the paper is the explanation of the continuous negative impact – in terms of transaction costs and juridical risks – of legislation on negotiation practices between industry and distribution. The paper highlights the links between legislation, the negotiation practices and the price definition by retail and manufacturing firms.

This chapter deals with five key themes: the objectives for companies and the attitudes and buying behaviour of consumers as concerns sustainable development, the firm’s strategies for reducing energy costs and waste, the challenges of bringing all actors in the supply chain into line, the firm’s supply policy in response to consumer demand and the technical, organisational and communication challenges surrounding the environmental impact of products. It then considers at the role of governments and NGOs in companies’ approaches towards sustainable development strategies before finally outlining the future prospects for these strategies.

The primary objective of this qualitative research is to gain a deeper understanding of the multi-channel impact on the role of sales forces and the way in which they are managed in a B2B context.

The authors compare the conclusion of their literature review with an analysis of the sales strategy of a leading cosmetic brand. They conducted their study by applying a multi-method qualitative research approach, which includes semi-structured interviews with managers and a research action performed by accompanying five salespeople on visits to their professional clients.

The results suggest that the development of a multi-channel context encourages salespeople to focus less on sales and order taking and more on advising clients about how best to develop their businesses. The multi-channel evolution seems to have enabled a transition of the role of sales people from a sales function to a function of a provider of personalized advice in the fields of business development, team management, salon promotions and merchandising.

The quest for coherence, particularly at the international level, would justify a broadening of our study to include the impact of multi-channels sales on the market positioning of the brand and of other brands in different industrial sectors.

The expansion of the multi-channel sales approach implies that managers are obliged to seek a convergence, or at least a degree of coherence between the different channels. This strategy can be used to promote an effective integration of channels at the international level into a single, reliable distribution system that avoids all forms of cannibalization. The Omni-channel strategy implies shifting the emphasis in the channel and moving from a focus on direct sales to the professional client (“selling-in”) to a stress on direct sales to the end user (“selling-out”).

This article provides an original analytical approach to highlighting training methods and systems of remuneration that will help sales forces to manage the inter-channel migration of their customers. Salespeople will then be able to view the future Omni-channel context as an opportunity to improve the status of their role.

The objective of this piece of qualitative research is to identify the key success factors (KSFs) of the grocery “click and drive” (or drive or drive‐in) model developed by French grocery retail companies and to understand the basis of their competitive advantages.

The authors compare the conclusions of a review of the literature with an analysis of the various grocery drive‐in approaches developed in France. These approaches are studied by applying a multi‐method qualitative perspective comprising semi‐structured interviews with managers and e‐consumer focus groups.

The research confirms – with the exception of the quality of customer reception, which is particularly valued by managers and consumers – the main key success factors identified in the literature, and reveals a real consensus among the main operators on those KSFs and on the nature of the kind of core competences required in order to obtain competitive advantages.

The comparison of the real profitability of “drive‐in” sales outlets and a more precise evaluation of the advantages of an integrated multi‐channel approach would provide more accurate results. Moreover, the authors have limited this study to an analysis of the French experience. The research implies that French grocery retailers should develop, along with a more differentiated logistical system, an improved approach to customer relations marketing. Moreover, it implies that “click and drive” outlets enable traditional grocery retailers to sharpen their competitive edge.

This article provides an original analytical approach to the identification of the critical success factors of large grocery retailers developing drive‐in services. In answering this research question, the study should also help large grocery retailers to achieve their development objectives and counter the stagnation of traditional retail formats, especially the hypermarket.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to identify, evaluate and structure the research that focusses on omni-channel retailing from the perspective of logistics and supply chain management; and to reveal the intellectual foundation of omni-channel retailing research.

The paper applies a multi-method approach by conducting a content-analysis-based literature review of 70 academic papers. Based on the reference lists of these papers, the authors performed a citation and co-citation analysis based on the 34 most frequently cited papers. This analysis included multidimensional scaling, a cluster analysis and factor analysis.

The study reveals the limited consideration of logistics and supply chain management literature in the foundation of the omni-channel retailing research. Further, the authors see a dominance of empirical research as compared to conceptual and analytical research. Overall, there is a focus on the Western retail context in this research field. The intellectual foundation is embedded in the marketing discipline and can be characterised as lacking a robust theoretical foundation.

The contribution of this research is identifying, evaluating and structuring the literature of omni-channel research and providing an overview of the state of the art of this research area considering its interdisciplinary nature. This paper thus supports researchers looking to holistically comprehend, prioritise and use the underpinning literature central to the phenomena of omni-channel retailing. For practitioners and academics alike, the findings can trigger and support future research and an evolving understanding of omni-channel retailing.