Positioning Strategies of Retail Firms in Ghana

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses how retail firms in Ghana pursue positioning activities. Overt observations, face-to-face interviews with staff, managers and mall intercept methods provide an insight into the positioning strategies of firms in the retail sector. We adopt an empirically based and generic consumer-derived typology of positioning strategies to obtain the results. The findings revealed that the dominant strategies are “service,” “value for money,” “attractiveness,” “reliability,” “top of the range,” selectivity, and “brand name.” The emphasis placed on each of these positioning strategies varies from firm to firm.

KEYWORDS:

• Positioning strategies
• retail firms
• Accra
• Ghana

Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Charles Blankson for the detailed comments and many valuable suggestions that significantly improved the paper. We are also grateful to Dr Collins Nunyonameh who copy-edited our paper. Further, we derived enormous benefits from the discussions with the managers and the sales assistants of Shoprite, Mr Price, Game and Kiki Clothing (Ghana) for giving us audience and revealing clandestine marketing positioning strategies during the interviews. All these views helped to form the assessments presented in this research work.