Foreign Retailers
One option for companies to market products abroad has been to create "pop-up shops" that allow them to sell their products in areas of heavy foot traffic, such as in busy streets or outside popular venues. Read this chapter to see how this setup can work from a financial standpoint.
Pop-up shops also play a role in the retail internationalization process when retailers/brand manufacturers utilize them to enter non-domestic markets. For example, Canadian phone maker BlackBerry has opened a pop-up shop in Manhattan's Brookfield Place to sell unlocked models of its most recent product lines, in an attempt to make BlackBerry products more accessible and to reassure the market that the company is still committed to reinventing the headset business despite rumours of demise.
Although emerging and established brands may have different motives for choosing pop-up shops as a channel for international market entry, they generally fall into three categories:
- Testing and adapting the brand and the retailer's concept with foreign consumers who are unfamiliar with it.
- Raising and sustaining the international profile of a retail brand.
- Developing relationship networks with stakeholders in foreign markets.
The key advantage of pop-up shops as a foreign operation mode is cost-effectiveness. In addition, many companies use pop-up shops in combination with other retail formats (i.e., company-owned stores) to further strengthen foreign retail expansion. By doing so, pop-up shops contribute to the company's revenue stream and help accelerate the company's expansion in the foreign markets.