1. Introduction
1.1. Research topic
Is retailing innovation the competitive advantage for S. Kumars Nationwide Ltd. (SKNL) to dominate the domestic market in the global economic recession environment?
1.2. Key concept
It is widely agreed that no path for ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy at the current time, and global expansion needs to stand on a company’s strong domestic market share, whereas retailing innovation is imperative (Quinn and Fally, 2010). The paper is initiated to examine why SKNL pursue the retailing innovation in its domestic market and, further, to what extent the retailing innovation works in building SKNL’s competitive advantage in dominating the domestic market.
1.3. Relevant Background
It is known worldwide that the contribution of the textile sector to Indian economy is huge, which is taken as the key growth engine of the whole country economy, whereas, SKNL is seen as the biggest player in the sector in India (Business Wire, 2006). Its business scale is complete, which comprises fabrics and apparel’s designing, manufacturing, marketing and distributing. Its brands and products are seeing popular in mature markets like North American and European, and it is engaging as the biggest operator and retailer in the domestic market(Bloomberg, 2013). The global economic recession since the end of 2008 hugely implicated on the retailing industry worldwide, while SKNL was also affected by losing its overall market shareat the domestic market and facing with declining sales in the overseas markets. On one hand, as SKNL sell products to the mature markets where affected seriously by the financial crisis, it needs to bear with the continuous shrinking consumers’ consumption on apparel products. Worse than that, the home market of SKNL, which is targeted as one of the biggest emerging market for international players, is doomed to be full of stiff competition under such a hard economic environment (Quinn and Fally, 2010).
1.4. Validity of the...