A Comparative Study About The Target Market Of Four Retail Formats In Guangdong Province

Retail industry plays an increasingly important role in social economic development of Guangdong province. In 2008, the total retail sales of consumer goods in Guangdong province amount to 1.28 billion Yuan, accounting for the 35.78% of the GDP. After several years of developing, many new retail formats have appeared. Competitions among these formats are increasingly fierce. At present, there are many theories for retail business both at home and abroad, which mainly concentrated on the retail format evolution, retail format structure balance, and its competitive advantage. However, there is less research about target market of retail format, even the Comparative study between different target markets. Nowadays, the competitive homogeneity is more serious. It's important and significant to analyze the differences of target market, and to get competition advantages for enterprise. Based on this background, the paper adopts the target market model which was designed by professor XieZan to analyze and research the other three target markets of retail formats. Then put these four target markets of deferent retail formats together to systematical analysis and contrast demonstrates, the author summarizes the similarities and dissimilarities between the target markets, which provide enterprises with management suggestions and marketing enlightenment.In empirical analysis part, the research object is the consumer of Guangdong province. Using the flexmix program package of statistical software R to make the collecting data reliability analysis, validity analysis and mixed regression analysis, at last concludes target market's demand characteristics and market scale of four retail formats. Research results show that there are differences in target market of different retail formats. The quantity of large supermarket is less than the other three retail formats'. The degree of concentration in the target market, the two largest target markets of department stores occupy of 74.8% of all the market scale, it's the highest concentration degree, while the other three retail formats occupy the lower proportion. In 10 attributes of the shop's overall evaluation, store image and checkout process's regression coefficient, which attracts high attention of consumers, is maximum in the four retail formats.