IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormksc/v25y2006i5p457-476.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Market Entry and Consumer Behavior: An Investigation of a Wal-Mart Supercenter

Author

Listed:
  • Vishal P. Singh

    (Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 244 Posner Hall, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213)

  • Karsten T. Hansen

    (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208)

  • Robert C. Blattberg

    (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208)

Abstract

This paper provides an empirical study of entry by a Wal-Mart supercenter into a local market. Using a unique frequent-shopper database that records transactions for over 10,000 customers, we study the impact of Wal-Mart's entry on consumer purchase behavior. We develop a joint model of interpurchase time and basket size to study the impact of competitor entry on two key household decisions: store visits and in-store expenditures. The model also allows for consumer heterogeneity due to observed and unobserved factors. Results show that the incumbent supermarket lost 17% volume—amounting to a quarter million dollars in monthly revenue—following Wal-Mart's entry. Decomposing the lost sales into components attributed to store visits and in-store expenditures, we find that the majority of these losses were due to fewer store visits with a much smaller impact attributed to basket size. We also find that Wal-Mart lures some of the incumbent's best customers, and that retention of a small number of households can significantly reduce losses at the focal store. Finally, certain observed household characteristics such as distance to store, shopping behavior, and product purchase behavior are found to be useful in profiling the defectors to Wal-Mart. Implications and strategies for supermarket managers to compete with Wal-Mart are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Vishal P. Singh & Karsten T. Hansen & Robert C. Blattberg, 2006. "Market Entry and Consumer Behavior: An Investigation of a Wal-Mart Supercenter," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 25(5), pages 457-476, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:25:y:2006:i:5:p:457-476
    DOI: 10.1287/mksc.1050.0176
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1050.0176
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/mksc.1050.0176?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kusum L. Ailawadi & Praveen K. Kopalle & Scott A. Neslin, 2005. "Predicting Competitive Response to a Major Policy Change: Combining Game-Theoretic and Empirical Analyses," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(1), pages 12-24, September.
    2. John R. Hauser & Steven M. Shugan, 2008. "Defensive Marketing Strategies," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 27(1), pages 88-110, 01-02.
    3. Dipak C. Jain & Naufel J. Vilcassim, 1991. "Investigating Household Purchase Timing Decisions: A Conditional Hazard Function Approach," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 10(1), pages 1-23.
    4. Karsten Hansen & Vishal Singh & Pradeep Chintagunta, 2006. "Understanding Store-Brand Purchase Behavior Across Categories," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 25(1), pages 75-90, 01-02.
    5. Seetharaman, P B & Chintagunta, Pradeep K, 2003. "The Proportional Hazard Model for Purchase Timing: A Comparison of Alternative Specifications," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 21(3), pages 368-382, July.
    6. Martin Pesendorfer, 2002. "Retail Sales: A Study of Pricing Behavior in Supermarkets," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 75(1), pages 33-66, January.
    7. Koen Pauwels & Shuba Srinivasan, 2004. "Who Benefits from Store Brand Entry?," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 23(3), pages 364-390, July.
    8. Kristiaan Helsen & David C. Schmittlein, 1993. "Analyzing Duration Times in Marketing: Evidence for the Effectiveness of Hazard Rate Models," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 12(4), pages 395-414.
    9. David R. Bell & James M. Lattin, 1998. "Shopping Behavior and Consumer Preference for Store Price Format: Why “Large Basket” Shoppers Prefer EDLP," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 17(1), pages 66-88.
    10. Rajiv Lal & Carmen Matutes, 1989. "Price Competition in Multimarket Duopolies," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 20(4), pages 516-537, Winter.
    11. Paul R. Messinger & Chakravarthi Narasimhan, 1997. "A Model of Retail Formats Based on Consumers' Economizing on Shopping Time," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 16(1), pages 1-23.
    12. Pradeep K. Chintagunta, 1993. "Investigating Purchase Incidence, Brand Choice and Purchase Quantity Decisions of Households," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 12(2), pages 184-208.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kopalle, Praveen & Biswas, Dipayan & Chintagunta, Pradeep K. & Fan, Jia & Pauwels, Koen & Ratchford, Brian T. & Sills, James A., 2009. "Retailer Pricing and Competitive Effects," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 85(1), pages 56-70.
    2. Igari, Ryosuke & Hoshino, Takahiro, 2018. "A Bayesian data combination approach for repeated durations under unobserved missing indicators: Application to interpurchase-timing in marketing," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 150-166.
    3. Kim, Chul & Jun, Duk Bin & Park, Sungho, 2018. "Capturing flexible correlations in multiple-discrete choice outcomes using copulas," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 34-59.
    4. Dr. Timothy J. Richards, 2015. "A Shameless Pitch for Quantitative Marketing," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(4), pages 564-567, October.
    5. Vardit Landsman & Moshe Givon, 2010. "The diffusion of a new service: Combining service consideration and brand choice," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 8(1), pages 91-121, March.
    6. Hökelekli, Gizem & Lamey, Lien & Verboven, Frank, 2017. "The battle of traditional retailers versus discounters: The role of PL tiers," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 11-22.
    7. Govert Bijwaard, 2010. "Regularity in individual shopping trips: implications for duration models in marketing," Journal of Applied Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(11), pages 1931-1945.
    8. Nitin Mehta, 2007. "Investigating Consumers' Purchase Incidence and Brand Choice Decisions Across Multiple Product Categories: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 26(2), pages 196-217, 03-04.
    9. Fok, Dennis & Paap, Richard & Franses, Philip Hans, 2012. "Modeling dynamic effects of promotion on interpurchase times," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 56(11), pages 3055-3069.
    10. Deleersnyder, B. & Dekimpe, M.G. & Steenkamp, J.E.B.M. & Koll, O., 2007. "Win-win strategies at discount stores," Other publications TiSEM 34fbe624-0ee7-4c52-b640-7, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    11. Andreeva, Galina & Ansell, Jake & Crook, Jonathan, 2007. "Modelling profitability using survival combination scores," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 183(3), pages 1537-1549, December.
    12. Kwangpil Chang & S. Siddarth & Charles B. Weinberg, 1999. "The Impact of Heterogeneity in Purchase Timing and Price Responsiveness on Estimates of Sticker Shock Effects," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 18(2), pages 178-192.
    13. Marko Sarstedt & Sebastian Scharf & Alexander Thamm & Michael Wolff, 2010. "Die Prognose von Serviceintervallen mit der Hazard-Raten-Analyse – Ergebnisse einer empirischen Studie im Automobilmarkt," Metrika: International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Statistics, Springer, vol. 20(3), pages 269-283, April.
    14. Konstantin Kogan & Avi Herbon & Beatrice Venturi, 2020. "Direct marketing of an event under hazards of customer saturation and forgetting," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 295(1), pages 207-227, December.
    15. Dennis Fok & Richard Paap, 2009. "Modeling category‐level purchase timing with brand‐level marketing variables," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(3), pages 469-489, April.
    16. Greg M. Allenby & Thomas S. Shively & Sha Yang & Mark J. Garratt, 2004. "A Choice Model for Packaged Goods: Dealing with Discrete Quantities and Quantity Discounts," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 23(1), pages 95-108, June.
    17. Meade, Nigel & Islam, Towhidul, 2010. "Using copulas to model repeat purchase behaviour - An exploratory analysis via a case study," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 200(3), pages 908-917, February.
    18. Bijwaard, Govert E. & Franses, Philip Hans & Paap, Richard, 2006. "Modeling Purchases as Repeated Events," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 24, pages 487-502, October.
    19. P. B. Seetharaman, 2004. "The Additive Risk Model for Purchase Timing," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 23(2), pages 234-242, March.
    20. Xinxue (Shawn) Qu & Aslan Lotfi & Dipak C. Jain & Zhengrui Jiang, 2022. "Predicting upgrade timing for successive product generations: An exponential‐decay proportional hazard model," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 31(5), pages 2067-2083, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ormksc:v:25:y:2006:i:5:p:457-476. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.