Integrated Marketing communication of Wal-mart

Table of ContentsIntroduction.....................................................................................................................3

DECEMBER 14, 2016University of Southampton

Nikhil.R. Jain-29031923

Marketing Objectives.....................................................................................................4

Target market..................................................................................................................4IMC objectives................................................................................................................4

Direct marketing.............................................................................................................5Electronic media........................................................................................................................5Magazine...................................................................................................................................6

Sales promotion.............................................................................................................7Point of sale...............................................................................................................................7Price off Promotion....................................................................................................................7

Public relations..............................................................................................................8

Social Media....................................................................................................................8

Qualitative research.........................................................................................................10

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness................................................................................11Magazine readership measure..................................................................................................11Testing.....................................................................................................................................11Pre testing................................................................................................................................11Post testing..............................................................................................................................12

Recommendation.........................................................................................................13

Conclusion....................................................................................................................14

Bibliography.....................................................................................................................15

Appendix.......................................................................................................................16

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Introduction

Integrated marketing communication is a strategy to ensure all promotional tools or communications channel are integrated together to work together in harmony. To have a deep inside of how the IMC (integrated marketing communication) strategy are implemented in an organization, I have selected Wal-Mart company to critically discuss the strategies.Wal-Mart stores, is an American public corporation that runs the biggest chain of departmental stores in the world. The company was founded by Sam Walton in 1962 and incorporated on October 31,1969. As of 31st

October,2016 it has more than 11500 stores and clubs in 28 countries under the banner of 63 different names. In United Kingdom, for instance, Walmart operates under the name of ASDA. As Per, the fortune Global 500 List in 2016, Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, as well as largest private employer in the world by providing employment to 2.1 million people in the world. Further, I will discuss the aspects of IMC concept with regards to Wal-Mart company.

Marketing Objectives

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The main marketing objectives of Wal-Mart company is to provide modern services to their valuable customers. Wal-Mart attain this objective by providing better services and more products in their product range. Wal-Mart has managed to keep the product prices cheaper as compare to their competitors while maintaining quality of products same. The 30 % of the queues have been reduced with the introduction of advanced technology at the checkouts. In this way, they are providing customer satisfaction. The organisation is successful in implementing the policy of lower prices with customer satisfaction. The company uses different medias to communicate their point of difference i.e. everyday low price.

Target market

Wal-Mart is targeting all the segments of society as departmental store is not specifically for any segment or group of society. However, most number of customers of Wal-Mart are women of age twenties and thirties. These women shop from Wal-Mart for themselves and their families. The second group of market are males as they also buy products for their families. In most of the marketing campaign Wal-Mart is not specific on a particular group.

IMC objectives

This concept focuses on keeping a company’s marketing communications consistent and coordinated. So, any messages the company deliver through any kind of media should strengthen the consistency of brand image.Wal-Mart uses different medias and communication channels to communicate their mission statement to the customers. Walmart’s mission statement is “saving people money so they can live better”

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which is synonyms to company’s slogan “Save money. Live better”. In Walmart, IMC is enforced by amalgamating marketing channels to achieve objectives and to strengthen relationships with customers and stakeholders.

Direct marketing

Direct marketing involves the media which directly conveys the message to the target market. It involves electronic media such as television, radio, magazines, sponsorships, newspapers and many more. Fortunately, Wal-Mart uses most of these mediums to convey its message of 'everyday low prices' to its customers. Wal-Mart advertises their creative advert in the television at peak viewing hours to target the greatest segment of the market. Newspaper and magazines are used to deliver creative ideas that a consumer can inculcate in their daily life, therefore enhancing their lifestyle quality.

Electronic media

TV advertisement: - TV advertisement is the main media that Walmart approaches It is a departmental store with broad range of products, so company believe TV is an ideal medium to reach out to the public. Let’s focus on some of the Advert that company made to reach out their customers:Christmas campaign advert: TheASDA(Wal-Mart in UK) Christmas advert for 2016 by Saatchi& Saatchi (renowned advertising agency) features the family audience and the Christmas celebration. As Christmas festive is approaching soon. The ASDA advert features the tagline “Christmas made better” and advert is made up of different moments of Christmas (Rodger, 2016). These range from preparing Christmas drinks to Christmas presents. By this advert ASDA tries to

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build up the trust of customers and providing every product that make customer’s Christmas enjoyable and fulfill their expectations, including good quality and great prices for the festive season. The same campaign and strategies was adapted by ASDA during the Halloween time. ASDA’s strategy is to persuade customers to buy all kind of festive products during festive season with a price competitive offering which gave them an edge over the competitors. “The Real Wal-Mart” campaign: - the ‘Real Walmart’ campaign focuses on two main areas: helping Walmart customers to succeed and helping Walmart associates to succeed. This campaign was launched on television and digital media. This advert demonstrates how people count on Walmart to save money on products and how company provide career opportunities for its associates. The people share their purchasing experience in Walmart, how savings that they made can help them to utilize those savings for their or their family’s betterment. This campaign was very smartly portrayed to all their stakeholders and the emotional approach was the touchpoint in this campaign. (wal-mart,2013)

Magazine

Walmart publish their own magazine i.e. Walmart live better. It is a lifestyle magazine dedicated to families who shop at Walmart. The magazine contains information related to recipes and ways to improve people’s lifestyle. In UK, ASDA publish magazine in the name of ASDA Good Living magazine. It is packed with full of useful features like how to refurbish your house with a simple design hacks, quick, convenient and tasty recipes from the food ingredients that customers usually have in their kitchen cupboard. It also contains tons of easy fashion and beauty tips that are in trend straight from the best beauty bloggers around the world. ASDA magazine has very subtle cover page. Consumer can easily identify the magazine by looking the cover page that this magazine is a mixture of food, lifestyle, home and many more things (see figure 5).

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Sales promotion

Sales promotion is a type of marketing tool aim to lift sales temporarily. It is used to introduce new product, attract more customers and clear out stocks. In every Walmart store, this strategy is followed to create interest in consumers to buy more products.

Point of sale: - With the upcoming Christmas festival, Walmart tries to kept their point of sale area full of decorative with Christmas products such as Christmas tree and decorations product. On the check-out area, customers often purchase single items which are low in price e.g.: - chocolates, recharge coupons and many such things. Walmart also provide free samples whenever company introduces a new range of product. So, Walmart has used the best of sales promotion to persuade customers to buy more Walmart products.

Price off Promotion: Walmart has always been successful in implementing this strategy. Company uses phrases and words such as Walmart price guarantee, ‘Take the challenge’(see figure and heavily low price on a roll down banner to communicate their point of difference to their customers. Another concept used by Walmart is ‘roll-back’ and instead of “o” in terminology they have put smiley to convey as a happy message. The company use on every discounted product shelf, so customer can catch this term and easy to make them buy the product.

I believe the Wal-Mart has been exceptionally well in using such strategies and they also focus on micro things which other companies are not that effective in application and ultimately it reflects in their sales. In my experience, with lots of varieties and good use of sale promotion strategy, my friends and I always end up buying products which is not necessarily required and this happens with many people.

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Public relationsPR (Public Relations) is the function of generating goodwill toward a company or organisation. It focuses on the relationship that are created between an organisation and its public (Ogden, 1998).PR is unpaid media and uncontrollable and media may generate negative or positive PR for an organisation.Wal-Mart uses foundation programme to create good image in Public. ASDA foundation programme provide grants of between £5000 and £20000 to NGOs who develop stronger and better community across UK by targeting social issues that are affecting local communities and it attracts lots of media about such events (Theplace, n.d.). Active communities network, for instance, who tackles unemployment issues by providing youngsters a good knowledge and providing access to work placements. ASDA foundation also sponsored many sports events such as ‘Run for All’ in many places in UK. This encourage people to take part either in running, walking, or volunteering and therefore making a difference by helping hundreds of local charities with the money they raised from this event. (ASDA, n.d.)So, here ASDA is trying to create a good impression on public and media by giving a support to a good cause event and by providing financial support to many NGOs for tackling social issues which lead to a Positive public relation.

Social Media Walmart has focused on social media to reach out their target audience and potential customers to promote themselves. This is because social media tool is one of the best marketing tool due to its consistent results.

FacebookWalmart has made a huge effort in developing its Facebook presence in this digital era. Most of Walmart’s posts contains about the product suggestions with the price and it also has caption competitions to boost

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customer engagement with the company. With the development of technology, Wal-Mart is trying to stand up front with using all the technology. Wal-Mart host live videos to update their customer about what Wal-Mart is up to. With every festival Walmart changes their profile structure with based on the festival, so to make consumer involvement journey thrill and smooth. This is a great strategy to make consumer feel about the festival approaching and highlighting the product suggestion will induce them to buy product. With the Christmas approaching, Wal-Mart post is mainly of Christmas products and families dinning together. So Wal-Mart is communicating the ideal Christmas environment digitally.

TwitterWalmart mainly uses Twitter to engage people and to satisfy them by answering public questions or any grievances they had during buying journey and post questions with certain topics including sports, caption contest and request public for retweets if they agree with certain statement. (Moth, 2013)Walmart sees the value of twitter to engage with customers rather than using just for marketing messages. Walmart initiated many campaign on social media including on twitter for instance, greenlight campaigns for veteran but many critics found a loophole (Baird, 2015). Walmart can link their social campaign with commerce which they failed in doing so. First mistake is uninspiring call to action: here Walmart invited people to visit and participate to switch to green bulb to support veterans but Walmart could have initiated well by posting images of green lights of their own taking or volunteering in any vet campaign. Second mistake: not connecting campaign to commerce. Wal-Mart urged to switch to green light on twitter but it failed to provide the link from where customer can buy(see figure 2). Walmart could have linked the campaign with the green light product. And on their actual web-site there is a zero mention of green light campaign on the product profile. So, customers couldn’t find the campaign related content on the product content (see figure 3). Wal-Mart should have linked the social campaign with the product properly as it made people feel, are they in a right place?

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PinterestWal-Mart is also present in Pinterest media, which aimed more at product ideas and promote green living. The product focused account has more than 12000 followers. Walmart uses Pinterest to promote creative ideas and special occasions such as Easter, Christmas and many more. (Figure 1).Walmart also launched its first ever competition on Pinterest, offering them the chance to win a $500 gift card by sharing the images of products that made them to have more eco-friendly lives using hashtag #walmartgreen and this competition fetched them hundreds of entries.(Moth, 2013)

Qualitative researchASDA arranged focus group research in south east London to identify the reason of stagnant in growth. The company found out that customers value the price and quality of product that company is offering but customers were founding difficulty in accessing ASDA stores. To resolve the problem company recently Launched click and collect service at four major underground stations. This will allow customers to order online and can collect their order from the station in evening. (Ruddick, 2013)

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

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Magazine readership measureAs per, National Readership survey, ASDA is the most widely read magazine title in UK. By combining data of print media readership and web media readership, the NRS has come up with the figure for most of the magazine titles in UK. ASDA Magazine readership (in thousands) in print media and web media is 5803 and 5235 respectively. While the runner up magazine ‘Your M&S’ magazine readership is 2259 and 4318 respectively. So here, ASDA magazine in terms of reachability and readership is far ahead then the second most famous magazine. (PressGazette, 2013)

Testing

Media Research vehicle: TRAC (Transport Research Audience Classification) is a database of commuter’s frequency in London underground. With an annual sample size of 5000 who commutes London underground frequently. But company is not relying solely on this vehicle when setting marketing objectives. So, ASDA did some field test to get some information and can cross reference what company has anticipated from TRAC dataPre testing- The pre-testing was done to identify where their target audience travels using the Underground transportation and to increase the online shopping amongst customers, ASDA selected two locations for testing. ASDA used call to action method i.e. poster add to visit the web-site with a unique code for £5 off on their first home shopping purchase. As this approach helped company to capture details of customer and delivery details will help them to understand whether they are reaching their target audience.

Post testing- the poster advert campaign had run for the period of month; post-testing has done to further analyze whether the customers have ordered from the web-site and the most preferred destination of their target audience. Then company assessed the result of this campaign by checking growth in sales and incremental in online shopping.

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Recommendation

Database marketing: - For companies like Wal-Mart where data are generated in abundance, so database marketing can be a huge prospect for Wal-Mart. The primary reason of not having

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loyalty card is that ASDA believes that they are rewarding consumers everyday by charging low prices. They give immediate reward unlike other departmental stores like TESCO, where customers have to spend vast amount of money to get discount vouchers that customers have to use at some point in future. But Loyalty card is not just the reward to customer but it also helps the buying pattern of consumer and can hold large data. Database marketing can help ASDA to identify many things and it helps in finding who are their target customers.

Public relation: - Employees are company’s asset. They are the front line of an organization and remains constantly touch with customer. Many in retail see the company as tyrant. company discourage its workers from participating in trade unions and been accused of abusing employee’s right. Bad employee relation and high attrition rate can create a negative impression in media and can hamper public relations.

Communicate ‘quality’ aspect: - Many countries associate low price as low quality like Japan. Wal-Mart’s uses their value preposition ‘low price’ as their differentiation and failed to communicate or convey about the quality. There are many retailers in a market, for instance, ALDI and LIDL where they provide goods at low price. Wal-Mart must focus on portraying quality aspect in their marketing communication as well.

Conclusion

Advertising is a powerful tool but to create a great advantage of it the marketing communication, advertising, media objectives must be linked

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together. The role of marketing communication is to differentiate company from their competitors and persuade customers.All and all, Wal-Mart has dealt with marketing and promotional element successfully to quite a good degree but company must focus more on their employee relation to create a positive public relation on public. For the betterment of the company, it should focus on quality aspect as well apart from using their price as their only value proposition.

Bibliography

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wal-mart. (2013, 05 4). working at mal-mart. Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from wal-mart: http://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2013/05/04/walmart-launches-national-advertising-campaign-to-show-the-real-walmart

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Ruddick, G. (2013, 11 20). Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/10459602/Asda-to-launch-click-and-collect-service-at-London-Underground-stations.html

Rodger, J. (2016, 11 15). Retrieved 12 11, 2016, from birminghammail: http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/watch-new-asda-christmas-advert-12147802

Moth, D. (2013, 01 10). Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from econsultancy: https://econsultancy.com/blog/61827-how-walmart-uses-pinterest-facebook-twitter-and-google/

Baird, N. (2015, 11 09). Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nikkibaird/2015/11/09/three-social-media-mistakes-walmart-is-making-right-now/#36db475973b2

Ogden, J. (1998). Developing a creative and innovative integrated marketing communication plan. New Jersey: A simon & schuster company.

ASDA. (n.d.). ASDA foundation. Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from ASDAfoundation: https://www.asdafoundation.org/partnerships/run-for-all

Theplace. (n.d.). Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from http://www.theplace.org.uk/juice/asda-foundation-community-grants-programme

PressGazette. (2013, 05 30). Retrieved 12 12, 2016, from PressGazette: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/nrs-combined-print-and-online-magazine-readership-figures-give-asda-top-spot/

Appendix

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Figure 1 Walmart board on Pinterest

Figure 2 Tweet on Greenlight campaign

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Figure 3 product on search result

Figure 4 Take the challenge

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Figure 5 ASDA magazine

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