This work has been conducted with the objective of helping develop a theory to explain and predict market performance of supermarkets. The concepts of trading area, market demand and market share are investigatedo and ways to operationalize and predict these concepts are developed in such a way that they can bi integrated into a framýwork to help explain and predict sales of existing and new supermarkets. Models to explain and predict theýe indicators of market performance as a function of environmental, competitive and controllable (by the retailers) variables are developed, based on empirical work conducted with a sample of about 2,000 customers of 15 supermarkets in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Despite the rather exploratory nature of the investigation, the model results have been encouragingly satisfactory
