Marketing Audit: Wal-Mart

2. If you had another five rounds of MarkStrat competition, outline the strategy you would take?

Threat: is potential problems/risks caused by external factors which can lead the bank/business into risk or unsuccessful. It occurs when the business face intimidation from competitors or other factors which lead to the operation cannot attract customers effectively/ efficiency. Then, it reduces profit/sale volumes. (Pride, W. M. 2011, p. 52)

Put your desire to win on hold and focus on excelling. The desired results will follow automatically.

Select your teams shrewdly, prepare the best points as well as use your absolutely among a kind capacities appropriately: those will certainly be the tricks going one to last

A. Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Defensive Mode – build up your income and outlast your challenger with your superior defenses

Sam Walton, founded Wal-Mart over forty years ago, where it started as a five-and-ten store in Bentonville, Arkansas (Stanwick & Stanwick, 2009). Since then it has become one of the largest retail stores in the world, with an estimated annual sales of close to $300 billion (Stanwick & Stanwick, 2009). His business philosophy was to provide low prices to its customers everyday (Stanwick & Stanwick, 2009). With such tremendous success in profits and growth, it has also brought many challenges relating to ethical issues in regards to; off-the-clock-work, sexual discrimination, health benefits, the role of unions,

Two companies that are involved at the forefront of this issue today are Costco and Wal-Mart, and although they are both similar in the sense that they sell low price merchandise, they both have different yet interesting approaches and perspectives of dealing with this social issue. On one hand we have our focal company, Costco, who pays $17 an hour on average to its workers, whereas Wal-Mart pays its full time employees around $10.11 an hour on average (Cascio, 2006). The difference in the wages paid by these two competitors is extremely significant, considering that Costco pays its employees around 70% higher than what Wal-Mart pays its employees for similar work. In order to assess the reasoning between each

Ten years earlier, 1985, Walmart was still a regional shift with $8.5 billion in revenue (Fishman, 29). However, Walmart grew in an unexpected rate in years. By 1994, Walmart 's size was bigger than that of Sears and Kmart combined. How could Walmart achieve such success unprecedented success? Since the day that Walmart was founded by Sam Walton, one of the Walmart’s key strategies has never changed: The Lowest Prices Anytime, Anywhere (“Our Story”). At the beginning,

The first Wal-Mart opened its gate to the public in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas (Minter & Reid, 2007). The philosophy behind opening this store was providing the general populace with great products at a reduced price and good customer service. The stores hit it off due to the great associations made with local suppliers by Wal-Mart to reduce the price. The control of the organization is currently 50% under the Walton family and the other half is shared by the public. Wal-Mart’s organizational system is a compact hierarchy. At present, about 11,500 retail centers present worldwide with about 2.1 million employees and about 3000 suppliers of a wide variety. Wal-Mart serves 250 million customers every year and right now has a net worth of about 230 billion dollars. Wal-Mart is opening up to possibilities of e-commerce at present, to further its reach into the population by providing more ease to the

In 1962, Sam Walton founded Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas on the principle of keeping the customer happy by providing them with the lowest priced goods on the market (Press 2004). He really wanted to make the lives of his customers better by selling them cheap goods so people can have more spending cash to make their lives better. Going on with this principle, in 1969 Sam, now with 24 stores open, officially incorporated the company as Wal-Mart Stores, Incorporated (Press 2004). Since then Walmart has blown up all across the United States and into the rest of the world becoming the most successful retail company on the planet. Its success can be mostly attributed to adhering to its founder’s ideology of low priced goods.

Sam Walton began Wal-Mart in 1962 and opened the first store in Rogers, Arkansas (History, 2010, p. 1). Walton was not new to the retail industry and had traveled the United States to learn as much as possible about the industry. Walton knew that customer needs were important to success and he wanted to know as much as possible about the industry to meet those demands. Sam Walton experienced strong competition from retailers such as Target and Kmart when he decided to expand the company. Currently, many retailers compete with Wal-Mart; however, the company has diversified to tire servicing, pharmaceuticals, home improvement, and

For example, your strategy might include developing a niche product to avoid competition, or choosing to position yourself amongst a variety of competitors, while looking for ways to differentiate your services.

Preparatory work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

STRATEGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .