Case Study: Barnes & Noble Essay

Target Corporation offers its customers a vast variety of products, well also providing a service. The corporation owns or has exclusive rights to many different brands ranging from groceries to clothing. For example, some brands that can only be found at Target are Archer Farms which provides food merchandise, Merona which supplies clothing and Room Essentials which provides home goods (Target, 2015, para.2). The shopping experience that Target provides can be defined as a service. The stores shopping experience is a service, since it cannot be patented, interaction with the customer occurs, it is heterogeneous, along with perishable and time dependent and contains the package of features (Chase & Jacobs, 2013, p.9). Target is a popular consumer destination because it provides both a service and goods making it ideal for one

Just like before, malls are and will continue to be an entertaining shopping experience. As entertainment changes - so do the entertainment requirements in a mall or outdoor shopping area. Adding more and better forms of entertainment and updating them regularly can keep the shopping experience relevant, and keep shoppers coming back to see what’s new.

Considering with the economic downturn, Barnes & Noble has found the way to offer price discount to all its customers specially price seekers. Since Barnes & Noble was a leading bookstore, it attracted many suppliers and publishers. Barnes & Noble was taking advantage of the situation where it had the ability to access a large customer base to arrange a better price deal from publishers and suppliers. Since it had a power of negotiate the price, it would add more value and strength to its business. The company was able to offer up to 30% off on the actual price from the publishers for hardcover bestsellers and 20% for all children books. In addition, Barnes & Noble offered discount program to its members. All members can receive extra 10% additional on top of 30% to hardcover bestsellers only if they agree to pay a $25 membership fee per year.

Barnes & Noble does business -- big business -- by the book. As the #1 bookseller in the US, it operates about 650 superstores throughout 49 states and the District of Columbia under the banners Barnes & Noble, Bookstop, and Bookstar, as well as about 200 mall stores using the names B. Dalton, Doubleday, and Scribner's. The company's GameStop subsidiary is the #1 US video game retailer with about 1,500 stores under the names Babbage's Etc., GameStop, and FuncoLand. Barnes & Noble owned about 75% of online book seller barnesandnoble.com after purchasing Bertelsmann's interest in 2003; Barnes & Noble then purchased all remaining shares and took the company private in May 2004.

However, how can a store that offers the same products and services be creating an authentic experience? Walker Percy, author of "The Loss of the Creature" would argue that Barnes & Noble is not creating an authentic experience for customers. The founder of Barnes & Noble had this prepackaged idea of what a community bookstore was supposed to be. Barnes & Noble wanted customers to not only purchase a book, but to get coffee or listen to music while they were there. In spite of this, customers don't go in a Barnes & Noble because it is a community bookstore. We don't expect an experience when we go in a Barnes & Noble store because we are used to having these products and services offered to us. Similar to Percy, we are not looking to get an experience because we already know what to expect in the bookstore. Percy said, "The consumer is content to receive an experience just as it has been written about, just as a consumer may surrender sovereignty over a thing which has been presented to him by theorists and planners" (7). Yet, we still enjoy the services offered to us, whether it be free Wi-Fi or a café. Barnes & Noble may say they are a community bookstore, but customers don't realize the store is giving them an

While value is a competitive advantage for Barnes and Noble’s retention of market share, their prices are not low enough to impose a low cost strategy.

Malcolm Gladwell is currently a non-fiction writer for The New Yorker. After college, he took a journalism position in Indiana and later took a position in Washington. In 1996, he moved to New York, where he is today. He has written five books and each has been on the New York Times best seller list (Famous Authors). In his first year of working as a journalist for The New Yorker, he wrote, “The Science of Shopping.” In this piece, Gladwell objectively evaluates Paco Underhill’s research within the business industry. Underhill “would have from a hundred to five hundred pages and pages of carefully annotated tracking sheets and anywhere from a hundred to five hundred hours of films” for each experiment that he conducts (99). With Underhill’s determination and research, and Gladwell’s journalistic qualities, this report changes the way anyone views shopping.

Consumers are always satisfied with good customer service. When it comes to retail store customer service and satisfaction it is important because department stores are large in size and finding help can be difficult. Colloquy, a company concerned with building customer value, released a survey and asked 3,000 consumers across five geographical areas to rate their personal experiences with retailers. Macy’s was ranked number one in the department store category, with the most loyal customers. To keep up with technology advances Macy’s has invested time and money into developing a more efficient online shopping site, Macys.com and Macysweddingchannel. This investment cost nearly $300 million in 2006-2008 is being used to scale-up these fast-growing businesses through improvements in delivery efficiency, online site functionality and customer service. To enhance the shopping experience at Macy’s 100 stores in 2007 experienced remodeling and began introducing the most advanced POS registers and systems to the sales floors nationwide. Macy’s passion is product and people. There continuing pursuit is to have unique fashionable merchandise ready for customer satisfaction. Macy’s promise is to always carry the best brands and the most-wanted items. They also believe in hiring the right employees. With the right employees, there will be a sense of motivation and helpfulness. The American Customer Satisfaction Index covers 200 companies’ products and

When I walked into Barnes & Noble, it gave me a home-like environment. Their shelves hold 20 to 200 thousand titles of books. Groups of couches and chairs are placed throughout the store to sit in while reading books and magazines. I feel like they wanted to give the store a home feeling as if you were just sitting in your own home reading a book. I know when I started to walk around the store it made me feel like I was at home. As I started to look around at books, I noticed a couch. I went and sat down for a bit, overviewing the book. Another feature I noticed about the store was people on their Nook. They have Wi-Fi to browse the internet for books to add to their Nook.

They take the constructive feedback they receive from customers and apply it to future enhancements. A unique feature is, they hand-pick their books; these books consists of Canadian small presses, national publishers, and international imprints as they echo the diversity of their customer’s interests (BryanPrinceBookseller, 2015). One of the main reasons why this bookstore has been so successful is because of the passion held within the business. The owners are all enthusiastic readers and highly value the art and heritage behind literature. In addition they are always happy to discuss what they are currently reading and are capable of making

Barnes and Noble Incorporated is currently the largest book and media-content retailer in the United States. Founded in 1873 in Wheaton, Illinois by Charles Montgomery Barnes, who had started it as a family business, it has since evolved into the biggest book marketplace of our time. Although Barnes and Noble has had a long-run of success, it is currently near the edge of bankruptcy. It’s lack of sales and the shift of interest in reading physical books has forced most book retailers to “close-up shop”, with Barnes and Noble being next on the list. Therefore, Barnes and Noble is not worth investing in, because of its loss

1-In order for Barnes and Nobles to use the Value Chain and Competitive Force Models they needed to be ingenious with their tactics. First, publishers are on B&N side and they are doing everything to make sure that B&N stay at float because they are basically their “bread and butter”. So B&N is securing supplier intimacy with the publishing companies which will lead to strengthening its loyalty relationship with its customer in the store and digitally. Second they are securing their niche in the market, they are doing this by having the stores advertise and communicate to their customer that a there is a specific book that “is a big deal” and B&N is offering an extensive inventory of physical books and it enhance its core competency. Microsoft announced in 2012 that they would be investing $300 million in B&N Nook tablet, e-reader business and its college division. This will enable them to included Windows 8 operating system in Nooks application; this is a space where it will have a product differentiate.

Barnes & Noble are taking different tacks with regard to agreements with authors agents, and publishers. Amazon is pulling content off the market and padlocking it to their Kindle. In response, Barnes & Noble is refusing to stock Amazon published titles in its brick-and-mortar stores. Barnes & Nobles' investment in the well-received, well-reviewed Nook appears to have been a solid business decision, the ripples of which will continue to be felt for some time. In fact, the Nook is the proverbial finger in the dike as the waters of Amazon continue to threaten the very infrastructure of the publishing business by eroding the relationship between publishers and bricks-and-mortar stores.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. operates as a content, commerce, and technology company in the United States. It provides access to books, magazines, newspapers, and other content through its multi-channel distribution platform. The company sells its products directly to customers through its bookstores and on barnesandnoble.com. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com, one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than 3 million titles in its eBookstore.  Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOK eReading product offering, customers can buy and read eBooks on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK eBook

The purpose of this paper was to observe the consumers of a retail store of my choice; I chose to observe Victoria’s Secret and Targets consumers, because I myself am consumers of those stores quite often, then to analyze the behavior of the consumers of Victoria’s Secret and Target. Victoria’s Secret and Target consumers differ because of the difference in type of retail they offer and sell. Victoria’s Secret consumers know what they are going to be shopping for women and certain needs or wants they are looking to satisfy. Target consumers shop for any age and any gender,