Wal-Mart's services

Wal-Mart recently opened a new store in Pullman. I went to look around, and took some pictures for my blog. Some of the pictures show the service of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a retailer, but its service is critically important to the business especially when they have many competitors on the Market. In Pullman, Wal-mart's competitors are Dismores, Safe-way and ShopKo. Safe-way and ShopKo are even located right next the Wal-Mart. However, People are attracted to go to Wal-Mart because of its variety of products, cheaper price for goods, and better services. I have never been rejected when I went to Wal-Mart for returning goods. So what kind of services do Wal-Mart offer? First of all, Wal-Mart has customer service center for each store. It helps any customer with general questions or returning and refunding goods. It says they offer "Money services, returns and gift registry" service. There are some machines to help customers to help. Some tags are gone from products while moving or placing products. Wherever these machines are located, there is a sign says "Can't find a price? you can check it right here". Wal-mart sells shopping bags that are usable for customers. Speedy checkout serve customers buying less than 10 items for quicker process. Self-checkout is for convenience and quicker process of checkout. All these services attract customers to Wal-Mart, the king of retailers.

Chap 12. Services

Apple Cup Special Promotion

I went to Wal-Mart, and I saw lots of promotions including holiday promotion and Apple cup promotion. Apple Cup occured this weekend, and, thank to the bad call, Cougars lost by 7 points. Beer industry is always excited for big sports games. I guess it is a part of American culture that people drink beer while watching a sports game. Miller Lite placed their products with an advertisement supporting cougars for the apple cup. This is very localized strategy. I never thought a beer industry would support a college sports team because it never happens in Korea. This is also very localized promotion, and this promotion is target marketing people in Pullman or related to Washington State University. Generally American marketers do well on localizing promotions or at least do better than Korean Marketers. By the way, Miller Lite says it is a "Proud sponsor of cougar athletics", and I think they are supporting our football team too much. =P I hope cougars do well next year.

Chap 11. Promotion

Customer Relationship Management

I already made a post about CRM, but I just wanted to add these pics. Therefore, I am not going to add much information in this post. I have been a customer of State Farm for more than 4 years. This year, they sent me this calendar. They want me to put this calendar on my desk, so it reminds me of State Farm every time I look at the date on the calendar. This is a great example of CRM. For each month, there is a picture, and they put my last name "PARK" in the pictures. I feel loyal =)

Chap 1. Customer Relationship Management

It's Turkey day! oh wait, it's Christmas!?

Holiday special promotion is a big issue every end of a year : Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Sales, and new year's clearance and more and more. Promotion is the coordination of a marketer’s communication efforts to influence attitudes or behavior. I went to Wal-Mart two days after the thanksgiving, and marketers of Wal-Mart tries to attract customer with this holiday special promotions. They put a sign saying "Merry Christmas" while I am still in thanksgiving mood, and they also created special shelves with Candies and Christmas gifts. Promotions do attract customers to buy more stuff if the marketers understand well about how the promotions work. What I wonder is that are the gifts and candies cheaper than usual? I'm sure some of them are, but I think they are exaggerating the products with packaging. Those green and red packaging makes look everything in the product good. I think, One day, I am going to find out the actual price of the products when not promoting and that of the products while promoting for holidays, and compare them.

Special promotions for batteries. "Power your Holidays for Less". I think it's a pretty good slogan, but I wonder why does Wal-Mart have special promotion for batteries in Christmas days. It would be more understandable if Wal-Mart was promoting one specific brand's batteries, but this promotion actually includes Duracel, Energizer and Rayovac. Why?

Chap 11. Promotion

My thought about distribution

In my definition, Distribution is the flow of products, information and "MONEY". (I did say this during class for an extra credit, and he said he is going to put this on the slides. I mean I'm just proud of myself) Distributions is critically important for suppliers and consumers. Distributions is a huge influencer of the price that consumers buy and placing which is one of the concepts of Marketing mix. Price of the product depends on how many distribution channels are there, how much money distributors want to charge for their work, and what distributions channels a producer uses. According to Mr. Featherman, a distribution channel is the series of firms or individuals that facilitates the movement of a product from the producer to the final customer. This is the end. This post is written based on my thought about distribution after learning about this distribution, so there could be some wrong information. Please, Feel free to correct it by commenting. By the way, I added a very funny video that shows some distribution can fail in the process.

Pricing for international products

We learn about pricing in Marketing class. The pricing we are learning in the class only focuses on general and broad concept of pricing. Since I am an international student, and I want to do international business when i grow up, I decided to find out about how to price for each product for each country. I found this video on Youtube (the greatest source I call). He specifically explains how to apply expanded pricing strategy used in the United States to Indian Market. Generally, Marketer must know how cultural variables will affect sales. Marketers must know what aspect worked in this country while it did not work in the other country. Also, They should know what aspects work in both countries. According to him, People tend to actually believe advertisements in India, so there should be less cost for promotion and advertisement. Like India's case there are many cultural variables existing out there. Marketer must consider those variables when setting price for a product.







Chap 9. Pricing

Wal-mart's own brand "Great Value"

In these days, Retailers not only deliveres final products made by suppliers and producers, but also produce their own brand products. According to Pearson's Marketing Principle, Brand is a name, a term, a symbol, or any other unique element of a product that identifies one firm's product(s) and sets it apart from the competition. "Great Value" is a brand owned by Wal-Mart, and it is known for its cheap price. From detergent to peanut butter, Various products are produced with the mark of Great Value. Great Value brands are usually cheapest among each product category. I guess it has advantage of low cost of retails since Wal-Mart owns the brand, and the products of Great Value brand definitely do not go for good quality but for favorable price by consumers. Product line is a firm’s total product offering designed to satisfy a single need or desire of target customers (ex: all the different types of Starbucks Roasted Whole Bean Coffee). Product mix is the total set of all product lines a firm offers for sale. The product mix can be one product line or many (referred to as narrow or wide).Great Value is just one brand, but it has a wide product mix. It keeps increasing product line every year.

Chap 8. Brand and product mix