Future of Retailer Profitability: An Organizing Framework

Retailers are dynamic in nature, and their strategies keep evolving with changing scenarios and availability of new technologies. In the current scenario, there is a need for a comprehensive and organizing framework for retailers to develop and implement a complex set of strategies. In this article, we broadly categorize retailers’ implementation of strategies at four levels—market, firm, store and customer. The four-level categorization has been done using a triangulation approach consisting of inferences from previous literature, interviews with practitioners, and reviewing popular press. In the future, retailers will expand to even more countries, and there will be plenty of scope for using advanced technologies and big data. This organizing framework accommodates for any such changes as well as guides retailers about ways of increasing profitability in the future. In this article, we also provide generalized expectations of strategies under each level which not only can be used by researchers as a direction of future research but also by practitioners to understand and implement their strategies in an effective and efficient way.