Retailing Concept

By Sai Verano

Retailing concept is a management orientation that focuses a retailer on determining its target market's needs and satisfying those needs more effectively and efficiently than its competitors. You can relate retailing concept with marketing strategies which will be tackled later on with my future posts.
Retailing concept emphasizes that high-performance retailers must be strong competitors. High performance doesn't limit itself to satisfying customer's needs per say but also watching competitors too. Let's take Jollibee and McDonald's here in the Philippines.

We can observe that what's new in Jollibee is McDonald's new product too. If Jollibee has their Chicken Joy, McDonald has their Chicken McDo. Every meal has their counterpart in the other competitor restaurant. This is so because firms must watch their competitors to make sure that they won't lose their customers. This happens as part of their retailing concept and as part of their marketing strategy.

Competitors can be classified into two types:

• Intratype competitors
• Intertype competitors

Intratype competitors are retailers or firms that has the same merchandise. They have the same product line, thus competiting with each other directly. Let's take Jollibee and McDonald's as our example again. Jollibee is a fast-food restaurant and so is McDonald's. SM Department store is competing with Robinson's Department store and so on.

Another type of competition is the intertype competition. It is also known as scrambled merchandising. This competition is between two companies with a wide array of product length and width. For instance, Watson's is selling not only medicines but also personal care products. so is Mercury Drugstore and HBC. Competition in this level is hard to identify though. Since they have a wide array of products, it is sometimes hard to classify who they're competing with.