The Marketing Strategy Of Walmart

Being a multi-billion dollar retailer comes with its perks. JCPenney’s dominance over catalog merchandising has now extended into the cyber world at www.jcpenney.com. This website is multi-functional and easy to navigate, but how would JCPenney’s new e-commerce site stack up against its toughest competitor, Kohl’s, on the web? The answer may surprise you. This is an intriguing look at how varied retail comparisons can be. While JCPenney is struggling with sales on the retail floor, Kohl’s continues to exceed expectations in their stores. Online though, it is a completely different story.

According to Turban and King (2003), internet technology renders retailers an additional channel for branding, transactions and customer relationship management, the adaptation of which may drive down retailers’ transaction costs, and ensuring faster and higher quality of customer interactions, resulting in enlarging the existing markets and consumer base. M&S realizes this and have tried to sell clothing via high street stores as well as via internet though they have experienced cost cutting, rationalisation and management changes in order to revive their business in recent years. Internet technology might enable sustainable competitive advantage, but problems remain on how to physically organize their online retail operations.

Wal-Mart is the world's largest retail and departmental store chain. Having business operations in 27 countries with 69 different brand names, Wal-Mart is able to serve a huge number of customers per day. Wal-Mart is the fastest growing and the most successful retail brand in the world. The factors which make it the strongest brand in its industry include large customer base, sound financial strength, strong brand image, and huge supply chain network. Wal-Mart has certain weaknesses in its operations and business setup like low acceptability of certain products, high employee turnover, and less recognition of newly introduced brands. These weaknesses can be overcome by availing attractive opportunities from the market and investing more in the most profitable areas. Wal-Mart faces the biggest threat from its competitors and ever-changing customer preferences.

“Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the nation and the world’s largest retailer. With 1.6 million workers, 1.3 million in the United States and 300,000 offshore.” (Article #4.4 in reader). Thousands of Wal-Mart stores across the United States of America are best known for their slogan there of everyday low-prices guarantee. Wal-Mart retailers are regarded by the general American public for the place to go to find everything from fishing gear to groceries at the lowest prices. However, to obtain these low prices Wal-Mart must cut expenses, which it does across the board, including the pay and benefits to its workers in the United States. Wal- Mart 's low prices do often save the consumer money at the counter when they purchase

Competition among retailers is aggressive, as the demand side of the industry is driven by consumers who expect to get the best value for their money. “Competitive advantage is anything a company has, or does better, that customers value but the competition cannot match” (Romero, 2005). Walmart has a sustainable competitive advantage over other retailers, largely due to their centralized focus of cost leadership and differentiation strategies.

To be the world 's largest low cost store that carries all types of merchandise for all possible consumers.

Sam Walton’s extraordinary business strategies drove Walmart to its success and their key focus was customer satisfaction. As part of their customer centric initiatives Walmart had set up a unique pricing strategy with their “Every Day Low Prices” EDLP (Karen Robson, 2013). They would offer customers their daily needs at the lowest possible price to drive Walmart’s growth in the United States (Karen Robson, 2013) . Their pricing strategy was different than other major retailers in the U.S at the time; this provided an advantage towards rapid success and expansion (Karen Robson, 2013).

Wal-Mart is one of the world's greatest assets to most people. It provides consumer's a place they can go to virtually get anything they need from, car repairs, to groceries, prescription's, even the latest toys and electronics. With all that said, this paper relates to the different forces in business that affects business: competitive, economic, political + legal + regulatory, technological, cultural + social, demographic, and natural forces. Although there are technically seven we are going to focus on competitive, political, technological, and natural forces.

1. TARGET MARKET: As discussed, target market is a group of potential customers in which a company directs its marketing efforts. A company should always anticipate consumers’ needs and work towards fulfilling these needs. It is one thing to identify your “target market” and another to satisfy them. Walmart’s credo is, “save money, live better” this summaries their target market, the lower-middle class and the poorer. (Low income consumers). Walmart is the only retail

In business, three major strategies comprising of cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies exist. The focus strategy emphasizes on providing services and products to a specified buyer group or market segment within a given geographic market. The differentiation approach is often defined as provision of services or products that are perceived to be unique in the market place. Wal-Mart emphasizes on the long-term strategy of cost leadership. Through this strategy, the company ensures that it offers customers with quality products at relatively lower prices than other providers in the industry. Through overall cost leadership strategy, Wal-Mart has been offering better quality products at a lower price than any competitor can offer. For the organization to achieve this goal, it has developed long-term supply chain management, which ensures that products are made available to the market at the required time (Enz, 2010).

Target uses a network of distribution centers, third parties, and its online website to distribute these merchandise. Target currently has 37 distribution centers located in 22 states with more than 16000 team members. As a major competitor of Walmart, Target runs differently in Distribution. For an example, the grocery selection of Target is little different from Walmart. Target uses distribution centers to provide the grocery selection rather than uses the partner companies. On the other hand, Target uses four facilities located near ports at Rialto, California; Savannah, Georgia; Lacey, Washington and Suffolk, Virginia to receive overseas suppliers’ shipments.

As determined by the IE Matrix, Wal-Mart fits into the category of grow and build strategies. Thus, the aforementioned strategies would fit Wal-Mart very well. All three of the strategies that we decided on are grow and build types. The three strategies that Wal-Mart would benefit most from are: market penetration, market development, and product development.

Walmart serves nearly 260 million customers weekly across 27 different countries, both in stores and through its websites (“Fortune”, 2015). Walmart relies heavily on its proper and effective marketing strategies; Walmart would not be able to achieve the level of success without these strategies. Low prices, easy access for its customers, and social media campaigns are a few of the vital tactics Walmart has used in its marketing plan. “Save Money. Live Better” is Walmart’s mission in delivering customers products at the lowest prices. This low price strategy plays a marketing role that caters to customers who seek the lowest prices and with grocery stores that provide great deals (Brown, 2017). Walmart’s low cost business model is protected by its powerful supply and distribution chains throughout the world. Customers can expect the same cost efficient style in every Walmart store worldwide.

The five generic competitive strategies are low-cost provider, broad differentiation, focused low-cost, focused differentiation strategy, and best-cost provider strategy. According to the textbook, “a company’s competitive strategy deals exclusively with the specifics of management’s game plan for competing successfully” (Gamble, 93).

Online commerce was introduced to consumers in the mid-1990’s, and in the years since, it has grown exponentially. It started out virtually nonexistent and has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Nearly every retail sector has entered online commerce; clothing, electronics, home, health and grooming items, even food and groceries are starting to gain traction online. Online commerce sites rival traditional brick and mortar stores such as Walmart and Target, as well as other big-box stores. As online retailers such as Amazon continue to expand, many brick and mortar stores have been making their way online, indicative of an increasing movement towards online commerce. With more than 80% of the online population having made an online