Positioning strategies and congruence in the positioning of high‐end indigenous and foreign retailers in sub‐Saharan Africa: An illustration from Ghana

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/tie.21960
• Date: 01 July 2018
• Author: Charles Blankson,Seth Ketron,Michael Fiifi Nkrumah,Gertrude Opare
• Published date: 01 July 2018

EMERGING MARKET PERSPECTIVES: AFRICA

Positioning strategies and congruence in the positioning of

high-end indigenous and foreign retailers in sub-Saharan

Africa: An illustration from Ghana

Charles Blankson

1

| Michael Fiifi Nkrumah

2

| Gertrude Opare

2

| Seth Ketron

3

1

University of North Texas, Denton, Texas

2

Ghana Institute of Management and Public

Administration (GIMPA), Accra, Ghana

3

East Carolina University, Greenville, North

Carolina

Correspondence

Charles Blankson, Department of Marketing,

Logistics, and Operations Management,

College of Business, University of North

Texas, 1155 Union Circle # 311396, Denton,

Texas 76203-5017.

Email: charles.blankson@unt.edu

This article examines the employment of positioning strategies through the lens of international

retailing for assessing congruence in the positioning of both indigenous and foreign retailers in

Ghana. Six retailers—three indigenous and three foreign—are examined in a triangulated

method, each through an in-depth case study. The results show that the dominant positioning

strategies consistently pursued by both indigenous and foreign retailers in Ghana are “service,”

“reliability,”and “attractiveness.”Although indigenous retailers (relative to their foreign coun-

terparts) employ more strategies, the majority of foreign retailers exhibit close-to-ideal congru-

ence among managers' intentions, actual practice, and customers' perceptions. The findings

show that foreign and indigenous retailers pursue varying positioning strategies in the market-

place, further complementing the utility of Western-developed typologies of positioning strate-

gies in a sub-Saharan African marketplace. Moreover, the results reveal how indigenous

retailers have embraced branding, further attesting to the changing and competitive nature of

the Ghanaian marketplace.

KEYWORDS

positioning strategies, congruence, retailers, sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana

1|INTRODUCTION

Responding to maturing markets and stiff competition in their

home countries, international retailers are showing interest in

international marketplaces (Coffie, 2016; Gripsrud & Benito,

2005), especially in fast-expanding markets. Teagarden (2017)

defines fast-expanding markets (FEMs) as lucrative markets that

are growing and outperforming traditional predictors of growth.

As noted by Acheampong and Dana (2017), FEM countries can

experience fast-paced growth irrespective of the challenges they

confront in their macroeconomic environments. One of the funda-

mental components of marketing strategy in both domestic and

international retailing is positioning (Diwan, 2016; Kara, Kaynak, &

Kucukemiroglu, 1996). Arnott (1992) argues that positioning

encapsulates the deliberate, proactive, and iterative process of

defining, measuring, modifying, and monitoring consumer percep-

tions of a marketable offering.

In international retailing, context matters for sampling purposes,

and the examination of actualcase studies of firms' activities is impor-

tant (see Gentile-Ludecke, Halaszovich, & Ludan,2017; Poulis, Poulis, &

Plakoyiannaki, 2013). Additionally, even though qualitative case meth-

odology plays animportant role in the study of congruencein position-

ing research (Diwan, 2016; Liu & Zhang, 2014), international retailing

scholars have overlookedsuch methodology in the sub-Saharan African

context. While the sociocultural, economic, and political conditions

under which international business strategies are made in sub-Saharan

Africa are unique and challenging (Babarinde, 2009), the environment

is not only a reservoir of profitable business and investment ventures

for creative and long-term-oriented international firms (Babarinde,

2009; Mmieh & Owusu-Frimpong, 2009) but is also an FEM

(Acheampong & Dana, 2017; Esposito, Tse, & Soufani, 2017; Gentile-

Ludecke et al., 2017).Across sub-Saharan Africa, cross-border firms are

successfully investingin stock exchanges in other sub-Saharan African

countries (see Mmieh & Owusu-Frimpong, 2009). Still, growing

DOI: 10.1002/tie.21960

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