Carrefour CEO José Luis Duran has said the French retail giant plans to continue building its namesake brand, by rebranding chains it owns around the world.
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Duran said the company, the world’s second-largest food retailer, wants to capitalise on the Carrefour brand name worldwide.
In an interview hosted on the website www.cantos.com, Duran said: “Carrefour making the brand work harder means a complete change in the attitude that we have had in the last 20, 30 years.
“We have an excellent brand name which we have undervalued, which we haven’t capitalised on. And the whole group culture has to change to use this brand name as one of our main assets.”
Duran cited the example of Spain, where the rebranding of certain Champion stores to Carrefour has reaped great rewards for the business.
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By GlobalData“We were losing tens of millions of euros with these 200 stores a year. So we thought it was a good idea to capitalise on our well-known Carrefour brand name in Spain, which was doing very well, and which continues to do very well, in the hypermarket business,” Duran said.
“Looking at the results, looking at the customers’ reaction, we would say it was a pretty interesting experience. So we tried it again in other countries. To a certain extent, all our countries are going to be impacted by what we estimate to be a real strategic decision, which is going to give us new levers of future growth.”
Speaking of its French business in the same presentation, Guy Yraeta, general manager of Carrefour’s hypermarkets business in France said there was a real opportunity to speed up growth in the French business by “rapidly changing” the name of its Hyper Champion stores to Carrefour.
“The difference between a Carrefour and a Hyper Champion is obvious to customers. There will be a broader range of foods on offer. Stock will include the Carrefour brand since we are going to replace the name Champion with the name Carrefour,” Yraeta said.
“But there will also be new ranges in other departments with a better targeting of categories such as consumables, the important Carrefour Home range and other products. For customers this means the guarantee of more choice and also of lower prices.”
The company has already rolled out the decision at seven trial stores recently.
“Sales figures are very encouraging with percentages in double figures,” Yraeta said. “To be more precise, 10 to 15%, depending on the shops and we have gained a market share on all our sites. These results are the results of seven shops for a trial period which only started a few months ago, so you can imagine the overall potential there could be in really expanding this concept, extending the name Carrefour, to all the Hyper Champions over a much wider area.”
