Theory of Brick-and-Mortar Retailing in India(ToR-b)

Abstract

Brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailers in India are constantly devoting their time, effort, energy, and money in discovering and adopting retailing theories, models, and frameworks that are practiced by the B&M retailers in the developed countries that have matured markets and consumers. This is a clear example of a serious timing issue. We believe the Indian market and consumers are moving towards the same maturity levels, but it is still a long way to go as the Indian consumers belong to the widest variety of religions, regions, languages, cultures, sub-cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds with divergent needs. In addition to expecting world-class overall store-image, they yet require retailers to facilitate honest and authentic human-led engagement. This means, thoughtful and logical integration of existing theories aligned to, the Indian market; consumer's maturity level; divergent consumer needs are crucial, and this is the core of our theory. The ToR-b adopts elements of retailing theories that are known and suitable for retailing in the Indian context, in addition to identifying (i) new elements influencing honest and authentic humanled engagement; higher consumer-level customization; higher levels of consumer-orientation, (ii) significance of their association and determination with return on investment, (iii) their role in influencing the long-term sustainability of a retailer, and most importantly (iv) their ability to enhance interest among existing and potential employees, investors, and consumer’s minds with a particular retailer. Insights from multiple empirical and qualitative studies, field experiments, and evaluation of consumer-level transactions involved in building this theory made us strongly believe that the overall phenomenon of B&M retailing in India is truly complex and complexity is necessary to an adequate description of a phenomenon. We hope that in addition to laying a foundation for new directions to guide future research on Indian retailing, our theory will provide new and noteworthy insights into the overall phenomenon of B&M retailing in India.

An Empirical Review of the Importance of Private Labels for E-retailers in India

“…Some common types of retail are department stores, specialty stores, supermarkets, convenience stores, e-commerce retail, franchise retail, pop-up stores, online marketplaces, etc. Many retailers operate using an Omni channel approach, combining various types of retailing to reach a broader customer base and provide a seamless shopping experience across different channels, such as physical stores, e-commerce websites, and mobile applications (GHR et al (2020) [3]). The origins of online retail can be traced back to the 1990s when the internet became more accessible to the general public.…”

The Applied Strategic Model of Organic Profit for Brick-and-Mortar Retailing in India (SOPR-b)

“…Evaluating the existing retailing practice of B&M retailers in India using the ToR-b lens indicated that out of 69 important variables in our theory, the organized retailers were aware of 41 and only 15 of them were also part of their key result areas (KRA). Whereas surprisingly the unorganized retailers were aware of all the variables and all of them were part of their KRAs [171][172].…”