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.
Highlights
1.1 Retailing in India – The Optimistic Lens The overall market size of the Indian retail industry that was 950 billion USD in the year 2018 of which 97 percent was from brick-and-mortar (B&M) retailing is forecast to reach 1.75 trillion USD by the year 2026
Despite India being dominantly represented by Tier-2, Tier-3, and Tier-4 cities are witnessing rapid expansion of national and international brands/companies such as Housing, Automobiles, IT, Banking and most importantly B&M Retail Stores into these cities owing to an exponential growth in the urbanization of Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities post-economic liberation, Government’s interest and plans for improving basic infrastructure at Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, relatively cheaper real estate, and most importantly steadily increasing disposable income level of consumers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities
The second element under the Implicit needs of consumers (IP) is the level of Customization (SP2) a retailer can offer to a consumer and the key element that is capable of influencing SP2 is the level of Empowerment (SP2a) provided to sales personnel to customize real-time offers, discounts, and promotions for a particular consumer and participate in decision-making concerning inventory management control [33,34,35], which is mediated by the overall organizational structure (SP2a1) adopted by the retailer [36]
Summary
Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102869/ MPRA Paper No 102869, posted 16 Sep 2020 13:27 UTC. 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. 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 is crucial, and this is the core of our theory.
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