Selection Listing Decisions: New Product Adoption of Food Retailers

Retail selection policy determines the competitiveness of retailers. This is even truer of the bustling food retail market, thus assortment determination is crucial in grounding profitability. This paper describes an analysis of new product listing decisions to provide a tool-kit for food-retailers and ideas for producers in this domain. The research applies in-depth interviews among the largest and some smaller international and domestic retailers in Hungary to explore the characteristics of their listing decisions. To examine the interviews, content analysis and informed grounded theory methodology are applied. The results include a novel theoretical and practical framework for new product adoption, while two main innovation-related attributes are explored: profit as seen from a global perspective by new arrivals that accept losses on certain products to reach other company targets, and the needs-based perspective which creates more a complex approach to product selection according to customer needs. The paper first presents an analysis of the secondary literature relating to new product listing and conceptualises the related factors. It then investigates food retailers’ new product adoption decisions in Hungary, emphasising the related strategies. Finally, a model is presented to describe the explored preferences