The Dynamic Evolution Mechanism Of Retail Enterprises' Retail Know-how In Terms Of Standardization And Adaptation In The Process Of Retailers' Market Expansion Overseas

The extensive expansion on the whole global market initiated by multinational retailers started from 1970s or 1980s, it took almost 10 years to come to China. Multinational retailers began to do business in China in 1992, the advent of whom caused a huge change of Chinese retail industry, both bringing in great vitality and great competition. Compared to the awkward situation when they arrived, after nearly 20 years, multinational retail companies represented by Carrefour and Wal-Mart have dominated Chinese retail market, which is so amazing that lots of scholars began to be interested in. Among lots of studies on multinational retailers' operation in China, the revolution of their retail know-how in terms of standardization and adaptation became a focus. But after looking through all those studies, it's not difficult to find out that most of those studies focused on the specific practices which the multinational retailers adopted to adapt their retail know-how in China, and they ignored the importance to pay attention to the process or mechanism of retail know-how. The question is, given to the differences between every enterprises, the specific practices adopted by the multinational retailers may only be referenced very little by other retailers. Only the mechanism behind those specific practices can be learned by other retailers to instruct their operation, and that is the meaning and innovation of this paper indeed.This dissertation adopts case-study approach and takes Wal-Mart and Carrefour, which are very successful in China, as research samples. By analyzing the revolution process of the research samples'retail know-how in Chinese market, and comparing which with their standard models in their motherland, the author hopes to discover the rules and mechanisms of samples'retail know-how revolution. After introducing and analyzing the cases, this thesis comes to an conclusion that the retail know-how of the samples'goes through four revolution stages:standard motherland model, preliminary adaptation, profound adaptation, restandardization, and based on which this paper comes up with a revolution model of the samples'retail know-how. What's more, this dissertation suggests that the tow factors of retail know-how have different adaptation degree, the internal factor is more adapted than the external factor. These conclusions are confirmed with the contingency perspective of international marketing research domain. The author hopes these conclusions can be a reference to the other multinational or multiregional retailers.