Strategy of image management in retail shops

A sound positioning in consumers’ mind, along with strong promotion support, brought many retail shops to the top. This is mostly thanks to the image created in the consumers’ mind. A retail shop’s image may but need not conform to reality. Image often looks like a cliché. It overstates certain elements of the shop while simply omitting others. That is exactly why image is of great importance and often crucial to consumer behavior. This paper aims at determining the impact of image on customer behavior in the course of decision making about shopping and choosing a particular retail shop. Image is a significant factor of success of every company, hence also of a retail shops. It is a relatively strong value and a component of creating competitive advantage. But if we do not pay sufficient attention to image, it can become counterproductive. Instead to, like an additional value helps creating and maintaining the advantage in competition and realization of business aims, transforms into a limiting factor. Therefore, it is imperative to identify the elements of image that are of greatest importance to customers. Research has shown that customers choose the retail shop first and after that products and brands within this shop. When it comes to the supermarket, as a kind of retail shop, research has shown that two out of three shopping decisions are made by the customer on the spot, that is, without previous planning. That practically means that we can influence customers with different sales techniques. The paper suggests different strategies of image management for supermarkets and conventional shops. For supermarkets it is the “widest assortment” strategy, while for conventional shops the strategy is that of a “selected group of products“. Improvements to research methods will enable getting more information about customer behavior, while pressures of increased competition in the business environment will force retailers to get better acquainted with their customers’ whole decision making process.