Retailing is the single biggest industry, recognized worldwide. Everyday we see the nuances of retailing coming in, to customers. The fashion preferences of consumers is also changing with change in lifestyles. Thus, there is enough room for organized retailers to come up with new fashion apparels. But it has been noticed that the well-known brands are still not flexible enough to tap the emerging fashion. Furthermore, organized retailers have also come up with their own brands (i.e., private labels), which have several benefits as they help tap new trends; and the profit margins on such private labels are also substantially high. In the long run, private labels enhance the brand equity of the established retailers. Thus, this paper emphasizes two aspects; (1) the preference of the lifestyle stores over the antediluvian stores that encompass the general merchandise; (2) the promotion of private labels by organized retailers over the well-known brands, and customers' attitude for such private labels.
Any business that directs its marketing
efforts towards satisfying the final
consumer, based upon the organization of
selling goods and services as a means of
distribution. Retailers receive and pass on
product from producers and wholesalers
to customers and are often considered as ‘middlemen’ or ‘intermediaries’. The key
objective of any successful channel is to
ensure availability of the right product, in
the right quantity and at the right time.
The actual term ‘retailing’ is derived from
the old French word ‘retailer’ which means ‘a piece of’ or ‘to cut up’ (Brown, 1992).
This implies the breaking of bulk
functioning of the retailer— that is, theacquiring of large amounts of the product
they sell and dividing it up into smaller
amounts to be sold to individual
consumers.
Worldwide, retailing is the single biggest
industry. It has an annual sales figure of
$6.6 tn. In the US alone the industry
employs 17% of the total work force of the
country. In Poland it is 15%, in China it is
12%, while in India it is 8% of the total
workforce. Indian market is worth $180 bn
annually and it’s growth rate is around
14%. The industry is expected to grow
more than $300 bn by 2010. In the US,
there are 44,000 malls serving a
population of 273 million, in the EU there
are 3,600 shopping malls serving 380million while in India there are handful of
shopping malls catering to the population
of 65-70 million across six metros in the
country.
|
