Study on the Construction and Dissemination Path of Corporate Culture in the Retail Industry: A Case Study of Decathlon

Abstract

Against the background of the increasingly intense competitive landscape in the retail industry, corporate culture, as a core soft power for enhancing an enterprise's core competitiveness, has gained vital strategic value. This study takes Decathlon, an outstanding enterprise in the sports goods retail sector, as the research sample. Based on six months of participatory observation data and grounded in Edgar Schein's Three-Level Model of Culture, it systematically analyses core characteristics of Decathlon's corporate culture and the internal logic that drives its construction and dissemination. The findings show that Decathlon’s center are its core values in "vitality, responsibility, authenticity, and generosity". Through a value-oriented recruitment and selection mechanism, a systematic cultural training system, and an employee empowerment and authorization framework, the company achieves the in-depth penetration and internalization of corporate culture within the organization. Furthermore, by materializing employees' service behaviors and designing scenario-based store spaces, Decathlon constructs a cultural transmission chain of "organization - employee - customer", forging an irreproducible brand differentiation barrier. The research conclusions provide actionable pathways for the systematic construction and efficient dissemination of corporate culture in retail enterprises, and also point to future research directions – verifying the universality of the conclusions through cross-case comparisons or quantitative research.