Global Retailers, Market-Driven Management and Innovation

The globalisation of markets forces large retailers to re-think their long-term development, combining corporate growth with demand satisfaction. In particular, global markets and the state of over-supply push mass retailers to adopt hard competitive policies based on market-driven management, which emphasise continuous product innovation in order to satisfy temporary demand opportunities (demand bubble). The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the main issues concerning market-driven innovation for global retailers. In fact, this subject, to date, is a relatively neglected element of the retailing literature. The paper is based on a review and synthesis of secondary data and published work and proposes to link together the issues concerning global retailing with market-driven innovation, offering an initial classificatory schema of activity areas where global retailers can innovate to compete in global markets. The paper concludes with an agenda for future research in this area.