The Impact of Standardization and Adaptation on Performance in Retailing: Empirical Evidence from Franchising

While the issue of standardization versus adaptation has dominated the field of international marketing for the last few decades, it has been largely neglected in the area of domestic marketing, and especially in retailing. Yet, in domestic franchise management, the standardization/adaptation dilemma remains one of the core challenges. However, while there is strong theoretical consensus in the literature on the issue, there is a lack of empirical research on standardization and adaptation in franchising. Against this background, the objective of the paper is to analyze (1) what variables are critical to standardization in franchising and (2) to what extent the standardization of these variables convert into performance outcomes such as customer satisfaction, revenue and profit. On the basis of a review on literature on standardization and adaptation in international marketing and franchising we developed a conceptual model which was tested empirically using a self-administered questionnaire which was sent to managers and CEOs of 463 German franchise systems. The final sample consisted of 61 franchise systems across different service sectors. More precisely, we examined the following set of hypotheses: