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Introduction
The presence of retailers within other retail stores via shop-in-shops is increasingly popular in both developed markets such as Europe, America and Japan (Misonzhnik, 2012; Jiang et al., 2014) and developing markets such as India or China (Jerath and Zhang, 2010; Basu et al., 2014), in sectors as varied as apparel, beauty, electronics or food (Fawkes, 2011; Veluet, 2015). Dating from the 1970s, the shop-in-shop format has gained momentum since the early 2000s, and is now repeatedly presented as an innovative option for retail store network expansion (Sorescu et al., 2011; Netmeyer et al., 2012; Gaupp and Kuhn, 2016).
A shop-in-shop – also referred to as a store-within-a-store, a concession or an in-store boutique – is a miniature boutique showcasing a specific brand, localised in a well-defined part of a store managed and known under a different brand (Netmeyer et al., 2012). It is operated either by a manufacturer or a retailer under the roof of traditional retailers (Jerath and Zhang, 2010; Kim et al., 2011). It attracted attention in marketing and retailing research in the 1970s and 1980s (Davidson, 1970; Ognjenovic, 1980; Worthington, 1984, 1985, 1988; McGoldrick, 1987), and knows a renewed interest since the 2010s (Jerath and Zhang, 2010; Kim et al., 2011; Gaupp and Kuhn, 2016; Li et al., 2016; Moussawi-Haidar and Çömez-Dolgan, 2017). This academic conversation has primarily focussed on retailers hosting shop-in-shops and on manufacturers running shop-in-shops. Still, the case of retailer-run shop-in-shops is, however unexplored but is considered a “fascinating direction for extending research” (Jerath and Zhang, 2010, p. 762). Undeniably, such a “retailer in a retailer shop” is particularly intriguing. Why do some retail companies choose to add shop-in-shops to their traditional monobrand stores while others do not? What are the determinants of shop-in-shop adoption?
Understanding shop-in-shops’ adoption by retailers is important for two key reasons. First, outlet multiplication is one of the basic alternatives for expanding the retail store network (Morschett et al., 2006). As such, it is worth understanding how shop-in-shops could contribute to innovative strategies to drive growth, considering that the introduction of original store formats along with the governance mechanisms supporting them facilitate retail innovation and expansion (Reynolds et al., 2007; Sorescu et...