Marketing Audit for Uniqlo

1.0 Introduction

Uniqlo is a famous clothing brand in Japan, founded in 1984 by Tadashi Yanai, who is richest man in Japan and the president of Uniqlo (Kansara, 2016). It provides consumers in all ages with fashion, comfortable, high quality yet fair price of casual clothes which made by fashionable and delicate texture. Uniqlo’s full name is Unique Clothing Warehouse, whose inherent meaning is to get rid of the unnecessary and redundant decoration of the warehouses, using supermarket-style and self-service shopping at a reasonable price to provide customers with the desired goods. Uniqlo's goal is to make all the people put on their own high-quality clothing for the new multinational group. This company use the most advanced production methods, sales methods and the most advanced mode of operation to become the world's first garment enterprises. According to Uniqlo’s official website (2017), Uniqlo have more than 1,300 stores in over 15 countries including China, the US, Britain, Australia and others in the world. This brand has become the world’s king of casual clothing, beating Western giants like Gap, H&M and Zara.

2.0 Target market

Uniqlo’s slogan is “Made for All”. They do not target a particular market. People who shop in Unique can be children, youth, middle age, old age and different genders. However, the general age range is from 5 to 35 years old, who might be middle class but full of self-confidence and positive attitude, and always have a constant pursuit of high quality of life. Besides, in the process of Uniqlo’s expanding globally into different countries including Australia, and most of which are urban areas. Thus, their target market also includes trendy young-urban-professionals.

At the beginning of the creation, Uniqlo determined their concept as "let everyone wear casual clothes”. "Basic models", like T-shirts, socks, jeans and other basic models of clothing, are usually not the best business opportunities for clothing industries, but they are everyone’s wardrobe staple. To keep high-quality and reasonable prices, Uniqlo design and manufacture every single item themselves (Uniqlo 2017). Uniqlo offers simple and clever wardrobe basics — t-shirts, pants, blouses and others. Despite those common variety, Uniqlo also designed some innovation such as slim down jackets that can be stuffed into a small bag, clothes that breathe and wick away sweat, as well as thin fabrics promising warmth at affordable prices and is suitable for every season. The clothing is on trend, yet casual and laidback. In addition to meet customers’ needs, Uniqlo designs different themes of clothing with high-quality texture, consistent simple design and rich colors, to meet customers’ different clothing combinations as well as fully demonstrate their ego and personality.

3.0 Environmental scan

Economic forces are the main environmental factors that affect the marketing activities of garment enterprises. At the beginning of the creation of Uniqlo, Japan's clothing market was either very expensive high-end clothing or shoddy low-end clothing, while cheap casual, low-cost yet high-quality clothing was still a blank page. However, the consumers’ purchasing power level was constantly rising, so the demand for cheap casual wear can be imagined. In addition, in the context of globalization, Uniqlo so that can enter China, British, the US, Australia and other countries and gain a better development.

Uniqlo's rivals are known to be Spanish brands ZARA, Sweden's H&M and other parity brands. The positioning of consumers is similar, so competition is inevitable. Actually, Uniqlo is still relatively small, with 12 stores in Australia, 449 stores in China and 846 in Japan, its biggest market (Kageyama 2016). Around the world, retail giant H&M from Sweden has 4000 stores, Gap of the US has 3700 stores, and Inditex of Spain operates 7000 Zara, Bershka and other brand stores. Compared to its rivals, its consistent Japanese style may have less competitive force in overseas countries.

What’s more, with the green environmental protection, Uniqlo also cooperated with the fabric manufacturers and developed a large number of fabrics under the premise of saving resources.

4.0 SWOT Analysis

There are some obvious strengths of Uniqlo, that the brand owns cost advantages and drives the market with low prices. It has a unique business model and a wide range of customers as lower price but high-quality clothing satisfies more customer groups. Besides, it has a mature e-commerce operation experience, combining online and offline activities with mature interactive experience.

Nowadays, e-commerce business around the world is booming, so that Uniqlo can take advantage of opportunities to expand rapidly around the world, for example, launch overseas delivery services online and expand their business to a larger range of countries. It is also possible to develop new materials or increase the functionality of the product to meet the inadequacy of fashion, and thus continue to maintain a mass production system and keep the lower price.

However, when Uniqlo is expanding internationally, its consistent Japanese casual style may not be the accepted by all countries conformably, and there is no guarantee that all countries can adapt to today's marketing model. Besides, the products that are located as basic casual items are still lacking in fashion and diversity, which can easily weary the customers.

As for the threats, Gap, ZARA, H&M and other clothing brands have also gradually launched online-to-offline operation mode, sharing similar customers groups and market with Uniqlo. According to Kageyama (2016), the biggest markets are