Wallmart

WAL-MARTпÑ--Ð...S MARKETING STRATEGY

Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton, the first Wal-Mart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. Seventeen years later, annual sales toped $1 billion. By the end of January 2002, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. was the worldпÑ--Ð...s largest retailer with $218 billion in sales. Wal-MartпÑ--Ð...s winning strategy in the U.S. was based on selling branded products at low cost, which enables the lower class and middle class consumers to shop for products and save. Due to the advances in technology over the years Wal-Mart has been able to achieve tremendous success. Wal-MartпÑ--Ð...s success has allowed the company to expand out of the United States.

About 100 million customers visit a Wal-Mart store somewhere in the world. Wal-MartпÑ--Ð...s marketing strategy was to guarantee пÑ--Ð...everyday low pricesпÑ--Ð... as a way to pull in customers. Traditional retailers relied on advertised пÑ--Ð...sales.пÑ--Ð... The company employed more than 1.3 million associates worldwide through more than 3,200 stores in the United States. Wal-Mart was named number one on the Fortune 500 list and was presented with the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Leadership, a presidential award that recognized companies for outstanding achievement in employer and community relations. Wal-Mart enjoyed a 50 percent market share position in the discount retail industry. Procter & Gamble, Clorox, and Johnson & Johnson were among its nearly 3,000 suppliers.

Though Wal-Mart may have been the top customer for consumer product manufacturers, it deliberately ensured it did not become too dependent on any one suppler; no single vendor constituted more than 4 percent of its overall purchase volume. Further, Wal-Mart had persuaded its suppliers to have electronic пÑ--Ð...hook-upsпÑ--Ð... with its stores. About 85 percent of all the merchandise sold by Wal-Mart