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Introduction
Since 2008, there has been a growing trend for international retailers to use pop-up stores in foreign markets, such as a Uniqlo store opened for two months in Paris in 2009, an Azzaro shop launched for ten weeks in 2010 in Riyadh, and a Louis Vuitton store set up for only four months in fall 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles.
The pop-up store, also referred to as a temporary, itinerant or guerrilla store, is a retail space that is intentionally opened for a short period of time (Niehm et al., 2007). The Japanese high-end fashion brand Comme Des Garçons is often presented as the initiator of the international pop-up store trend, as it opened its first store of this type in 2004 in an old warehouse in former East-Berlin for a period of just one year. Since this initiative, the phenomenon of international pop-up stores has exploded insomuch as they are viewed as the “latest expression of innovative solutions” in marketing channels (Musso, 2010, p. 37).
Even though the number of international pop-up stores continues to increase, they have received very little coverage in the international retailing literature to date (Picot-Coupey, 2012). However, it has been widely acknowledged in the academic literature that selection of the most suitable foreign operation mode (FOM) is an essential but very difficult decision (e.g. Welch et al., 2007). Managerial reports have also stressed the key role that the FOM decision plays in retail internationalization: “Perhaps most critical is the method of entry into the chosen market” (Deloitte, 2009, p. 3). Therefore, it seems particularly worthwhile to gain a deeper understanding of what makes a pop-up store an appropriate choice of FOM.
As such, the purpose of the present research is to investigate the choice of the pop-up store as a FOM and its role in the retail internationalization process. If a few research has been conducted on pop-up stores (Niehm et al., 2007; Surchi, 2011; Russo Spena et al., 2012), none of them has focussed on their use in an international context up to now. Thus it is interesting to explore how heads of international retail brands assess the distinctive features of a pop-up store in a given foreign...