Modes de déploiement de réseaux de points de vente au sein d'un marché spécifique : l'exemple de la Belgique

This work attempts to analyze how firms specializing in retail clothing deployed spatially in order to conquer the Belgian market. Two types of outlet networks were constructed and compared to analyze the links between the current distribution of these networks and their deployment in space-time since their arrival on the market. The exercise was carried out on 53 networks in the clothing sector in the Belgian market, which represents 1667 stores found in a database for which the followin data is known: location, year of establishment, franchise management, brand name, group. This data fed two factor analyses used to construct the typology of current networks and classification of modes of deployment used by the networks studied. Today’s networks consist of small networks of large cities in the north, small networks of large cities and present in some shopping centers, medium-sized networks present in city centers and shopping malls, large networks located preferentially in peripheral districts with low level equipment and competition and finally large urban ubiquitous networks. Deployment modes are divided into ascendinghier-archical diffusion, nonspecific diffusion, constant national hierarchical deployment, descending hierarchical diffusion, particular deployment from three polarities that represent the triangle of fashion in Belgium and finally diffusion by contagion.