Dymocks Business Analysis Business Analysis & Recommendation

Dymocks Background

Company Profile

Amongst the book sellers in Austrailia Dymocks ranks as the largest book store controlling over and above of 20% of Australian book market. In the year 2006, Dymocks added to its range of services by providing an online store to embrace the growing market of online shoppers. This move increased the company's global market presences and markets share.

Australian oldest book store Dymocks has over 70 stores expanding across Australia. It is a family business owned by William Dymock since 1879 focusing on distribution and sale of learning materials for book lovers, gift and leisure items. The main focus for the business is to provide excellent and enhanced book buy experience for customers providing a full range of products. Additional to its range of books, Dymocks prides itself to have a wide range of E-books, DVDs, CDs, and other related items.

In Australia there are over 5,200 book stores and book retailing businesses whose total annual revenue adds up to $4.1 bn. The book store industry has for the past five years seen a decline in its annual growth mainly attributed to the increased number of supermarkets and convenient stores venture to stock up on books. Despite this decline Dymocks book stores in Australia have maintained their market control owing to its dedicated customer oriented service and passion for books. Additional to the declining revenues earned by book stores in Australia, there has been a shift in the financial global market that poses a challenge on consumption behaviors. The upcoming competitors in the industry have led to the losses in revenue in this industry by coming up with strong price competition strategy.

Relevant personnel

The family owned business recruitment strategy targets to hire personnel holding technical skills as well as love and passion for books. This strategy ensures the employees at Dymocks can easily relate their competences to the company's culture and value. The media campaign at Dymocks focuses on what they offer their customers, their brand range and their employees' passion for books. This highlights the company's passion for books and the desire to ensure learning as a new and every day experience to all. With a passion for books and reading employees place the company as an ambassador to new learning and reading experience for customers. In short, it is observable that Dymocks hiring strategy seeks to maintain a workforce that extends a passion with potential of influencing new and existing customers to visit the store once more. The culture at Dymocks is highly customer focused.

Purpose

A continued decline of up to 3.2% in the annual revenue through to end of year 2014 has been forecasted in the industry. Revenue is expected to be seriously affected by the decline in circulation of printed newspapers and magazines due to the shift in consumer's preferences to other media platforms such as the internet. Demand for newspapers and books will be influenced by trends in actual household income, consumer sentiments, internet shopping and the level of internet connections. The book retailing industry is expected to undergo revolution due to the introduction of E-books. E-books are set to post rapid growth over the next five years with consumers fuelling demand due to their portability and interactive features. The emergence and continued presence of competitors in online book store will see to it that books store continue to suffer a decline in the number of books sold annually.

Current Situation

Australia's biggest book retailer has continued grow year after another in spite of the decline in the $1.3 billion book retailing industry. Dymocks loyalty programme is the largest of its kind in Australia. The programme has 700,000 members and it allows the company to track its customer's preferences and needs. It's about marketing to a single person instead marketing to very large number of people. The loyalty program contributes half of the sales derived from repeat purchase made by customers.

Dymocks have...

Dymocks have also partnered with Google to offer about 1 million E-books to its customers. This widens their reach of reaching towards many potential customers. E-books account for only about 2% of the book sales in Australia. In spite of the revolution in internet and the launch of E-books, customers still love touch, smell and feel of the new book that is crucial to invest in book stores and create bonds with them through loyalty cards. There is a preference for reading a hard copy of the book more than its soft copy -- (the E-book).
Proposals

That Dymocks should replace its Franchise Recruitment Manager (Morris Short) with someone else who has better experience at Franchising. This will ensure that Dymocks doesn't have to close its future stores within a span of two years as it has already happened previously when it closed 10 of the 13 brand new stores.

That Dymocks should continue to focus more on maximizing it book sales for now, rather than jumping fully into the E-books sector, as book sales generate maximum revenue for the company and the E-book sector is very small in Australia. (only 2% of the total book retailing industry revenue)

That Dymocks should not make any changes in its current functional strategies in Australia, as they are working perfectly. Despite the fall in the book retailing sector in Australia, Dymocks is growing.

Implications

The revolutionizing change in the financial markets over the years poses an immense challenge on demand for books in the book store industry. Additional to this challenge is the influx of more competitors in the industry. This raises a challenge to Dymocks books store as it struggle to maintain higher demand for its books and sales revenues.

The challenge of E-book stores and continued preference for online access to book increases the need for Dymocks book store to rethink their marketing strategy. With the continued growth in number of households, institutions and individuals accessing the internet, Dymocks needs to re-think their marketing strategy to incorporate the online users and market. Their loyalty programs should extent the corporate culture to online store allowing existing and potential customers to embrace online reading culture affiliated to the company.

Recommendations

The organization faces a challenge of maintaining enthusiastic and passionate employees owing to the declining in job security. Employees at Dymocks book store will feel their job position to be threatened by the declining revenues an aspect that is bound to reduce their morale in job performance. A consideration of improving the employees' level of job satisfaction should be considered by developing an online sales interactive platform. This plat form will engage the employee to undertake interactions with potential and existing customers to ensure that their passion for books is transmitted to customer creating an additional sale avenue.

To cater for the online sales platform the books store need to take up special dealership with publishing houses encouraging them to offer their books for sale on the companies' online platform. This will capture the changes in demand and put the company at the fore front to influence their sales revenues. Dymocks launched E-Publishing in December 2011. The platform allowed authors to self-publish books in partnership with Dymocks. Dymocks took a part of it as royalty and some of the selected books were made available in the stores. More emphasis on E-publishing should be considered to increase the range of books available at Dymocks E-book stores. This will increase the company's range of products and their online traffic thereby placing the company at the fore front of increasing their revenue base. The company will also emerge highly competitive and preferred among online users.

The change in the global financial situation is likely to affect household expenditure on books and alter their book reading culture. A change in the culture of book reading might take a…