Retailing in Italy. Players, strategies and trends

Retailing in Italy is characterised by slowness in modernisation and internationalisation com-pared to the other European countries. The main reasons are restrictive regulations, especially governing the opening of large stores, and small firm size. This paper introduces the main players in the Italian food and nonfood retail market. The first part focuses on current devel-opments in grocery market structure, strategic retail banner positioning and store format per-formance, at national and local level. Competition in nonfood retailing is also analysed, em-phasising the key role played by international chains. The second part of the paper focuses on three major trends. The first is the growth of private labels. The second is the spread of loyalty programmes and the increasing use of loyalty card databases in planning and implementing micro-marketing strategies. The third and last trend concerns shopping behaviour, where there are changes in shopper profiles and needs