The international marketing strategy of grocery retailers – the strategy of adaptation and standardization

Research question – The research question, that this study attempts to answer, is, what and why grocery retailers, which specifically work with the strategy of standardization, adapt in their marketing mix to the host market. Main adaptations are analyzed with regard to psychic distance in terms of consumer characteristics. Methodology – This study presents a qualitative research design. Secondary data, in-depth interviews and personal observations were used, in order to identify adaptations, which were conducted in a grocery retailer in Germany, which is its home market, and in Sweden, which is considered to be a host market. Findings – The main findings of this research indicate that grocery retailers that specifically work with the strategy of standardization, adopt their core strategy at the host market, in order to keep their economy of scale. However, the standardization strategy may cause negative financial results, which is why adaptations, in order to attract new customers, are required. Conclusively, a mix of both, the adaptation and standardization marketing strategy, has to be utilized.

Does Gibrat’s Law hold for Swedish energy firms?

Gibrat's law predicts that firm growth is purely random and should be independent of firm size. We use a random effects-random coefficient model to test whether Gibrat's law holds on average in the studied sample as well as at the individual firm level in the Swedish energy market. No study has yet investigated whether Gibrat's law holds for individual firms, previous studies having instead estimated whether the law holds on average in the samples studied. The present results support the claim that Gibrat's law is more likely to be rejected ex ante when an entire firm population is considered, but more likely to be confirmed ex post after market selection has "cleaned" the original population of firms or when the analysis treats more disaggregated data. From a theoretical perspective, the results are consistent with models based on passive and active learning, indicating a steady state in the firm expansion process and that Gibrat's law is violated in the short term but holds in the long term once firms have reached a steady state. These results indicate that approximately 70 % of firms in the Swedish energy sector are in steady state, with only random fluctuations in size around that level over the 15 studied years.