The Maze: IKEA tops furniture preference in France, Spain, Austria and Poland. Grocery has a different winner in every country. The contrast matters for retailers expanding abroad: a familiar category proposition can travel, but the customers waiting at the border may already favour someone else. These are first-place identities from separate EY-Parthenon studies in 2025–26, not a ranking of sales. The useful question is where a brand repeats, and where it meets a different preferred rival.
Furniture travels better than a generic promise to sell everything. IKEA wins all four furniture-and-home comparisons. Decathlon, the sporting-goods retailer, wins sport in France, Spain and Poland; Intersport leads Austria. Those repeated names show that country differences do not rule out international success. A practical interpretation is to test whether customers understand the same category promise abroad. The rankings alone do not establish whether assortment, price, stores or service caused these wins. Exporting a logo is easier than earning the same customer response.
Amazon's strength has a visible Polish limit. Amazon leads electronics in France, Spain and Austria. Poland instead names Media Expert, an electronics retailer. That exception changes the expansion question: a brand choosing where to sell should check the preferred destination in each country and category before allocating its budget. It cannot treat Amazon's position elsewhere as evidence of the same preference in Poland. First place also gives no winning margin. A narrow lead and an overwhelming one would look identical here.
Grocery and beauty demand a country-level competitor list. E.Leclerc leads grocery in France, Mercadona in Spain, Hofer in Austria and Lidl in Poland. Beauty also has four winners: Sephora, Druni, dm and Rossmann, respectively. Different names do not necessarily mean domestic ownership; this comparison identifies customer favourites, not national champions. For a supplier, the immediate commercial implication is a different potential retail partner in each market. Whether that partner offers attractive margins or enough distribution still needs separate sales and contract evidence.
Fashion exposes the limits of neat category labels. France names Vinted, the resale marketplace, specifically for adult multibrand fashion. Spain names department store El Corte Inglés; Austria names fashion platform Zalando; Poland names clothing brand 4F. Those are different selling models, and the underlying category boundaries differ. The General row also mixes France's overall winner, Action, with other countries' category winners. Treat those rows as clues to investigate, rather than a like-for-like contest. France's fan rate counts people calling themselves fans among all buyers in a sector. The other national studies use different scoring methods. Scores across these studies cannot be read as one common scale.
Why it matters: For expansion planning, use preference as an early test of who already holds customer attention. Then check purchases, reach, price and fulfilment before committing money. IKEA's repeated wins make a useful benchmark for a portable category offer; the changing grocery and fashion winners make a useful warning against copying the same partner list everywhere. Four markets provide a comparison, not a passport to all of Europe.
Sources: Source post · Lengow comparison · EY-Parthenon France methodology
