If you cannot fight them, complement them - The resilience of urban retail agglomerations

What is it about?

The wheel of retailing is turning, one retail format comes and another one disappears. But is it really that simple? In the conclusions of our research we argue “no”. Our research journey departed from the simple question of why consumers shop in different kinds of retail and service agglomerations (such as malls and high streets) within the same urban catchment. By doing so we focus on the competition between different agglomeration formats from the residents’ point of view. Empirically we investigated the competitive relationship between high streets/town centres and malls across three European capital cities, i.e. Vienna, Ljubljana and Bratislava. Using surveys of 2,161 consumers resident in these three cities we find limited differences between formats in terms of the investigated drivers of competitiveness. Further we reveal a positive relationships of patronage towards both formats in all cities. The significant difference in why respondents patronise them suggest a partly complementary existence of the two types of agglomeration.

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Photo by Ryan Kwok on Unsplash

Photo by Ryan Kwok on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We explain this apparent complementarity through the theory of adaptive resilience that has seen evolved agglomeration formats such as high streets/town centres develop to provide a differentiated offer and consumer attraction compared to enclosed malls. It is the resilience that has let the retail side of high streets evolve their service offer and thus adapt in the face of fierce competition.

Perspectives