Revisiting the Big Middle: an fsQCA approach to unpack a large value market from a product specialist retailer's perspective

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PurposeIdentifying the patterns of retail institutional change has piqued the interest of retail academics for nearly a century. The Big Middle hypothesis is one of the most recent and hybridized versions of similar theories. According to it, retailers seeking a dominant position in retailing can migrate into the Big Middle, the largest market segment, by specializing in a large market with a broad product assortment or by focusing on a specific product category and simultaneously catering for multiple segments at the same time. This study provides empirical evidence for the latter proposition by employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on the case of UNIQLO, a Japanese clothing specialist retailing giant.Design/methodology/approachThe authors devised a survey to assess (1) consumers' perceptions of UNIQLO's store attributes and (2) their perceived distance between the UNIQLO and potential competitors. The authors used fsQCA procedures to identify multiple confluences of causal conditions that led to a high level of consumer patronage for UNIQLO from various market segments.FindingsThe findings show that UNIQLO's dominance in the Big Middle stems not only from capturing a sizable homogeneous market but from aggregating multiple heterogeneous market segments with disparities of various types. This finding explains how a specialty store retailer achieves its Big Middle position.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings gleaned from fsQCA are not statistically generalisable. It, therefore, is essential to ensure whether similar phenomena are observed under different spatiotemporal settings. Concerning the scope of the research, this study's finding is pertinent to only one part of the Big Middle hypothesis. Future studies are required to cover other dimensions of the Big Middle, including the generalist retailer's cases of the Big Middle.Practical implicationsThe results of this study may present a valuable tool to deepen retailers' understandings on; (1) the multiple causal recipes of customer patronages to their retail offerings, (2) who the pure fans of their stores are, (3) who their principal rivals are in the mind space of the consumers, and (4) their overall market position upon aiming to realise the Big Middle. It will give retail managers an insight into how to design, implement, and churn an efficient and effective RBM.Originality/valueThe study's originality is in empirically scrutinizing and elaborating a part of the mechanism of retail change heralded by the Big Middle hypothesis.