Abstract

This doctoral thesis presents the findings from an empirical cross-sectional survey of food
retail internationalisation in Taiwanese hypermarkets, supermarkets and traditional markets. A
critical review of the works of Dupuis and Prime (1996) reveals erratic sales performance of
hypermarkets operating in Taiwan and in other Asia-Pacific countries since 1989; this sales
trend may be linked to lack of understanding of Taiwanese shopping preferences and choices
(Burt and Carralero-Encinas, 2000). This led to the research question: “Can global food
retailers using hypermarket store formats achieve and sustain their competitive advantage in
emerging economies such as Taiwan”. This led to statement of research objectives with the
overall aim to investigate how global food retailers using a hypermarket store format can
successfully operate in the Taiwanese food retail market. These objectives were achieved by
adopting a phenomenological research philosophy and a mix of focus group interviews and
questionnaires (Churchill and Iacobucci, 2005; Saunders et al., 2007). The primary data were
presented and analysed using both qualitative and quantitative techniques through employed
Microsoft Excel and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).
The thesis identified six critical factors: (1) facility convenience, (2) shopping environment, (3)
convenient products, (4) price incentive, (5) convenient services, and (6) shopping
convenience which impact Taiwanese store patronage. The results of the factor and cluster
analyses reveal that ‘facility convenience’ (with the highest alpha coefficient value of α =
0.748) has the greatest impact on five Taiwanese shopping clusters: (1) Value shoppers, (2)
Environment shoppers, (3) Efficient shoppers, (4) Leisure shoppers, and (5) Convenient
shoppers. Hypothesis and chi-square tests revealed a relationship between the factors and
clusters, which represents sources of competitive advantage for each store format, and
formed the bases for constructing a conceptual framework for retail internationalisation in
Taiwan. The framework is the thesis’ major contribution to knowledge in providing better
understanding of Taiwanese consumer patronage of store formats - this has series
implications for global food retailers in the broad area of food retail internationalisation.
The major limitation of the thesis relates to the fact that there is a limited extent to which the
conceptual framework could be generalised across emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific
Region. The issue of generalisability led to identification of the following two key areas for
further research:
• Testing the conceptual framework by widening the sample size to cover other cities in
Taiwan and other emerging markets. This would make the framework more relevant
to the Asia-Pacific Region.
• A comparative study to identify trends in grocery shopping behaviour involving
hypermarkets, supermarkets and traditional markets in Europe and Asia.