Findings
Strengths: Wal-Mart has great retail brand recognition. It values money saving ideas in all of their stores, and for the overall corporation. Wal-Mart is known for its convenience and a wide range of products all under one roof. In 2002 82% of all households in the US made a purchase at Wal-Mart. Half of all Americans visit a Wal-Mart at least once a month, and of those half one-third go once a week. Wal-Mart's core strategy is to be the low cost leader. Wal-Mart's competitive advantage is because they are the low cost leader. Wal-Mart commits to deliver quality products with the lowest possible price. Wal-Mart attains this in several ways; their strategy is to have multiple store formats for the different local environments, with a pledge to have every day low prices. They also carry a wide selection of products with a big percentage being name branded merchandise. They want to have the highest level of customer service for their customers. Their stores are "user friendly" store environments, where the goal is making the customer's experience satisfactory for shopping at Wal-Mart. Innovative merchandising where displays are made in house and mass produced, thus saving them money and time, they can get their design out in thirty days. They also have a disciplined expansion into new geographical markets. They use a technique called the backward expansion, where they enter the smaller towns before they enter the bigger metropolitan areas. This was one of the most distinctive things about Wal-Mart. This helped keep advertising cost low for Wal-Mart because they had word of mouth advertising before they entered the national advertising arena, and when they did enter it the cost w ...