Wal-Mart Customer Drive

WAL-MART

Customer-driven marketing strategy

The company, based in Bentonville, Ark., has reached such enormous size that it has been compared to General Motors in the 1950s and Standard Oil in the early decades of the 20th century.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told the New York Times recently that "Wal-Mart is the greatest thing that ever happened to low-income Americans. They can stretch their dollars and afford things they otherwise couldn't."

Wal-Mart ranked number one on the Fortune 500 list of America ’s largest companies because of its almost $259 billion in sales. The second-largest company on the list was oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. with $213 billion in revenues, followed by car makers General Motors and Ford, whose revenues totaled $196 billion and $164 billion, respectively.

Marketing concept is the marketing management philosophy that holds that achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfaction better than competitors do.

As a result of its latest growth spurt, the company with the “always low prices” market positioning has revenues that represent a stunning 2.3% of U.S. gross domestic product. It’s about operations. Wal-Mart has focused on driving costs down and giving money back to the customer rather than putting it in the bank. As for selling themselves, Wal-Mart has a very simple marketing strategy. Give people really cheap prices and have friendly employees.

All businesses are vulnerable to competitors and Wal-Mart is no different. At least 25 major chain stores, including F.W. Woolworth, have closed their doors since 1980. The forces that lead to trouble for retailers include: dramatic changes in customer buying tastes and behaviors, organized resistance from unions and government, the emergence of new competitors and the failure of internal corporate operations to handle company growth. So far Wal-Mart has been able to keep all these forces in check. They execute a single business strategy and execute it successfully in multiple formats to increase reach.

Twelve years after founder Sam Walton’s death, some say the company is so powerful that the most pressing concerns of U.S. businesses are rising health care costs followed by China and Wal-Mart. There is a lot more room for Wal-Mart to grow. Wal-Mart could easily reach $500 billion in revenues in the next four to five years.

Even though Wal-Mart has conquered rural and middle America, there are vast urban markets to saturate in places like New Jersey, California and New York. In addition, Wal-Mart is reaching into global markets with stores in Brazil, Canada, Germany, South Korea, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and China.

In the United States, Wal-Mart is experimenting with renovating and opening anchor stores abandoned by department stores in malls, and trying out the concept of small grocery stores called Neighborhood Markets. Wal-Mart is offering services, such as tax preparation. Some Wal-Mart stores come with gas stations. The company recently launched an online music store. “They have enough money to go into just about any consumer market they want. This company can expand more aggressively into groceries and durable goods, including autos.

In the case of Wal-Mart, there is nothing on the horizon to immediately challenge the company’s retail supremacy. But hundreds of dollar stores are opening each year, particularly in towns where Wal-Mart has driven out competition. Products in dollar stores are cheap; the stores are small and the check-out lines are shorter. Two competitors, Target and Costco Wholesale, already offer low prices and appealing products hat draw customers away from Wal-Mart, especially the more affluent ones.

The societal marketing concept is a principle of enlightened marketing that holds that a company should make good marketing decisions by considering consumer’s wants, the company’s requirements, consumers’ long-run interests, and society’s long run interests.

On Monday (April 5), the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer for a series of stories on the often hardball tactics that Wal-Mart used in becoming the world’s largest