Target Break Case Study

Target Corporation was founded in 1902 in Minneapolis as the Dayton Dry Goods Company, though the first Target store was opened in 1962 in nearby Roseville, Minnesota. Not until 1995, was the first Super Target was built. In 1999 Target launched their website Target.com. Target grew and eventually became the largest division of Dayton Hudson Corporation, culminating in the company being renamed as Target Corporation in August 2000. The Corporation became a major retailing power house with $52.6 billion in revenues from 1,397 stores in 47 states by 2005. Realizing a 12.1% sales growth over the past five years target had announced plans to continue its growth by opening

Target’s business-level strategy is one that does not strictly focus entirely on one plan to gain a competitive advantage over competition. It encompasses various strategic and meticulous planning and decision making that is implemented in order to position the company at the top of the retail industry. With competition from the likes of Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, and Costco, Target uses several clever and “out-of-the-box” ideas to attract consumer attention and ultimately increase market share within the industry. Most of the company’s ideas centered more on the differentiation of products and services provided to customers than lowering prices. For quite some time, the company’s plan was to not compete head-to-head with Wal-Mart in terms of lowering prices but instead to provide their customers, who they identify as “guests”, with a special experience every time they visited a Target location. One idea that was implemented was to market and sell upscale, trendy clothing and unique merchandise at discounted prices.1 This strategy, known as the “cheap-chic” strategy, focused on providing good quality clothing from various well known designers and fancy products from high-profile manufacturers for prices lower than their competition. This plan was vital because it began essentially began the concept of customers referring to Target as “Tar-zhay” which according to Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan, who are university professors, as a “connote its trendy sensibility”. Target

The Target Corporation has undergone many changes due to the 2013 security breach where hackers stole personal information from credit and debit cards of at least 70 million customers. Target sales and reputation has dropped from this instance, thus eliciting changes in their security systems, changes in management, and a few policy changes in handling customer information. With the public eye on the corporation’s handling of the situation, Target has been communicating these changes through various means. The changes they needed to communicate were informing customers of the security breach, addressing the bad press coverage to shareholders, downsizing of employees, and

Buyers are the wildcard in the retail industry. Being able to research products for quality, suitability and price online, consumers are able to move from retailer loyalty to brand loyalty, giving them a lot of power. However, loyalty card systems increase the likelihood that shoppers will stay loyal to certain stores.

Jarvis, K., & Milletary, J. (2014, January 24). Inside a targeted point-of-sale data breach. Retrieved from http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Inside-a-Targeted-Point-of-Sale-Data-Breach.pdf

The Target data breach remains one of the most notable breaches in history, it was the first time a CEO of a major corporation was fired due to a security event. The breach received an enormous amount of attention, it caused corporations and individuals to change the way they think about information security and data protection. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2013 hackers gained access to 40 million customer credit cards and personal data of 70 million Target customers. The intruders slipped in by using stolen credentials and from there gained access to vulnerable servers on Targets network to launch their attack and steal sensitive customer data from the POS cash registers. All this occurred without a response from Targets security operations center, even though security systems notified them of suspicious activity. The data was then sold on the black market for an estimated $53 million dollars. However, the cost to Target, creditors, and banks exceeded half of a billion dollars. This report will review how the infiltration occurred, what allowed the breach to occur including Targets response, and finally who was impacted by the security event.

In December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many

One of the issues Target could face if it continues to only focus on private label store brands and do not promote national brands is losing a percentage of its customers. Although Target’s innovative amount of store brands on its aisles has proven successfully for the retailer and consumers have shown a positive reception to the products, there are still a number of customers who are accustomed to

An essential process that all successful businesses initiate is properly planning for the future by establishing objectives and creating strategies to accomplish them. Firms that do not develop and implement plans will not be as prepared, controlled, action oriented, or focused as those organizations that have strategies in place. Unfortunately for Target, their lack of good planning led to their extreme and shocking failure in Canada. There are many reasons as to why the much-anticipated launch of Target Canada failed. Firstly, Target neglected the importance of time orientation by planning to open more than 200 stores across Canada within 10 years. It is critical to slowly develop when expanding into a new country with a completely different

As the November Meeting approaches, CFO Doug Scovanner is faced with the problem of choosing which of the five controversial projects available to accept. Our task is to assume this role and evaluate each of the projects based upon two major criteria. The first is determining the firm’s financial motives by quantifying the projected value added to the firm and the risk associated with each project. When determining to accept or reject projects based upon adding value, the most helpful instruments we have are Net Present Value (NPV) and the

This case study analyzed five different projects Target Corporation had to decide on capital spent for which project created the most value and the most growth for the company and its shareholders. By analyzing the financial statements and exhibits of each project, I was able to determine the positives and negatives of each of these alternatives. The alternatives were Gopher Place, Whalen Court, The Barn, Goldie’s Square, or Stadium Remodel.

The National Retail Security Survey reports that the average shrinkage rates in 2014 decreased or remained flat for more than six out of ten retailers (Hollinger et al., 2015). This demonstrates progress in implementing anti-theft measures, training, and internal processes because retailers continued to combat this problem with more advanced

Today, most organizations are outsourcing critical business operations to third parties. Although third parties offer many benefits to retailers, including providing organizations access to services they don’t specialize in, they can often create additional security risks and exposures. “Because an adversary will always utilize the easiest, simplest and most effective way to break into an organization, a third party with full access to the network poses significant exposure.”(Cole, 2015)

One of MasterCard’s major strengths was the success they gained from their sponsorship of the 1998 World Cup. By 1998, MasterCard had 364.6 million cards in circulation worldwide, a gross dollar volume of $651.6 billion dollars, and was accepted in 220 countries and territories. In the late 1990’s, MasterCard successfully released a new campaign, “Priceless”, with the slogan “there are some things in life that money can’t buy, for everything else, there’s MasterCard”. This campaign received outstanding results in 26 countries.

A payment card is mostly electronically linked to an account or accounts belonging to the cardholder. These accounts could be deposited accounts, loan or credit accounts, and the card is a means of authenticating the cardholder. The Wal-Mart–Visa/MasterCard “honor-all-cards” settlement and the proposed First Data– Concord EFS merger is just two examples of the dynamic forces at work in this industry.