Image and personality: two complementary tools to position and differentiate retailers

The objective of this research is to study retailers' positioning and the way they are different from each other through the concepts of image and personality. To illustrate this point, eight retailers in three sectors (grocery, clothing and sport articles) that are leading retailers in France in their respective sectors are considered. The tools studied, image, and personality, are, thus, applicable to generalists (in the grocery sector) and specialists (in the clothing and sport articles sectors), as well as to retailers providing utilitarian products (in the grocery sector) and retailers providing symbolic products (in the clothing sector). This research highlights the stronger differentiating power of the concept of personality compared to the concept of image. It also indicates that these tools are complementary. While the concept of image focuses on functional attributes of retailers, the concept of personality concentrates on their symbolic characteristics.