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Types of retail

Published on October 29, 2026   14 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hi, my name is John Talbott, and this is my talk on effective retail management. I am a professor of marketing at the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University in Bloomington.
0:14
Today, I want to talk about types of retail and discuss a bit about the varied approaches to physical retail and then look at some forms like department stores, specialty retail, mass market retail, big box retail, off-price retail, grocery retail, and club, which are all forms of retail that have endured for a number of years, and because of that, they have nouns associated with them.
0:43
So why do we have names for certain types of retailers? The reason is because consumer preferences change in real time, and these changes accumulate over time. Retailers have to adjust, and they can't do it just immediately because they have fixed assets like stores and other things. So they have to adjust from time to time, and what's happened is that some of these forms have endured because consumers continue to find them attractive and also because they've been able to modify their form to stay current. So when you think about retail, you can sort of think about store, people, location, and product as somewhat immutable. So retail adjusts on these three top-level constructs to serve an audience in the way that they choose. We're going to use these different ideas in order to discuss different forms of retailers, and we'll look at examples like Kroger and others like Walmart as we go forward in our discussion of retail forms.

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