This article applies a configurational approach to study the fit between retail format, business strategy, and multi-channel setup. Its empirical material consists of five case studies, and a data set of 74 sporting goods retailers in Sweden. Our results show that a retailer can create strategic advantages when its multi-channel setup fits with its business strategy, and that retail format is important for explaining differences in growth and profit, the former being assigned to e-commerce and the latter to physical stores. Moreover, the study reveals that to some extent online channels also have positive performance implications for physical store retailers.

1. Introduction

In the last fifteen years, marketing channel options such as social media, search engines, and price comparison sites have supplemented traditional marketing channels such as sponsoring, print advertising, events and TV commercials (Dholakia et al., 2005; Rangaswamy and Van Bruggen, 2005). This change has led to new types of combinations, and the traditional way of doing business and marketing within the retail sector has met new forms of competition. Indeed, when product features are easily copied, and production costs and margins are constantly under pressure, it is said that well managed and sound multi-channels are a source of competitive edge – to stand out from the rest (Payne and Frow, 2004; Rodríguez-Díaz and Espino-Rodríguez, 2006; Rosenbloom, 2007; Sharma and Mehrotra, 2007).

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services