Cognitive source and clothing retail. Some results form an empirical research in the Italian fashion market

Abstract The aim of the paper is to analyze the role of market knowledge embodied in sales outlet management, focusing on such knowledge as a factor of competition for the apparel retail enterprise. The paper investigates in a static way the role of cognitive sources in relation, on the one hand, to the structural characters of the retail enterprise and its sales outlet, the latter understood as a commercial product, and on the other hand to performance expressed as revenue achieved by the sales outlet. In a dynamic way the paper also focuses the attention on the relationship between cognitive sources within the retail outlets and their influence on the way individual outlets are run by managers. The role of knowledge is examined in terms of the relevance and characteristics of the processes involved (knowledge formation, transfer and utilization), while the cognitive processes themselves are analyzed by exploring the actions undertaken by managers to develop market knowledge.