¶ … Wal-Mart Corporation
Mission and Vision Statement Analysis
Linking Wal-Mart's Mission and Vision to Their Strategic Goals ands Objectives
Assessing the Link Between Wal-Mart's Financial Performance And Its Strategic Goals
Wal-Mart Competitive and Marketing Analysis
Wal-Mart Marketing Analysis
Selecting An Appropriate Strategy (low cost, differentiation or niche) For Maximizing Organization's Return on Shareholders
Potential Wal-Mart Merger & Acquisition Strategy
Incentive and Reward Strategies for Wal-Mart Employees
Evaluating How Current Strategies Define Ethicacy Levels at Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart Ratio Analysis
Income Statement Analysis, 2007 -- 2011
Wal-Mart Capstone Analysis
Mission and Vision Statement Analysis
The foundations of the Wal-Mart value chain and its global success is predicated on how well this company aligns every internal system and strategy to their unique value proposition of Low Price Everyday (LPED) leadership. This unique value proposition galvanizes the mission and vision statement of Wal-Mart and is one of the foundations of their success and continued growth. Their competitors give lip-service to price competition yet only Wal-Mart has engrained the LPED value proposition deep into their logistics, supply chain management (SCM), supply chain planning and optimization, advanced pricing, real-time logistics and most of all, in-store retail operations. Wal-Mart also is a very analytics, and metrics-driven company, measuring every aspect of their operations with a focus on continual process performance improvement. Wal-Mart sees the LPED value proposition as critical to their functioning as a continually improving business, continually striving for greater efficiency and performance gains over time. Wal-Mart evaluates each product line, retail location, distribution center and supplier with a strict series of analytics and metrics to ensure performance meets standards while also looking for opportunities for improving the area itself (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012). Wal-Mart believes passionately that all of these factors must be captured in analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to support their mission statement which is "to help people save money so they can live better" (Mcginn, 2009) (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012).
What galvanizes and energizes the Wal-Mart employee base is the belief and evidence from analytics that their many efforts to keep operating costs low translates into their core customer base being able to make ends meet. In a sense the Wal-Mart employees see themselves on a mission to make their vision and mission statements a reality for their customers., many of which are just making ends meet. This is why the mission and vision statements are so successful for the company. They are all concentrated on the core segments of their customer base that need the low prices to keep their family budgets balanced, making sure they make ends meet every month. Research indicates that the company's core business segment is the Price Value Shopper, which at 16% of the total customer base, generates a disproportionate amount of the revenue and the majority of in-store visits (Frazier, 2006). This segment also averages a per capita income of $47,000 a year, right at the median U.S. income, and is dominated by women running households on their own or with their husbands (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012). It is important to see the woman as the primary purchasing influence at Wal-mart to understand how much saving money and delivering value to their families relates to their self-evaluation as wives and mothers (Frazier, 2006). Based on an analysis of the filings Wal-Mart has made over the years with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012) an analysis of their customer base has been completed and is shown in Figure 1. This figure is a map fo the Wal-mart customer base by percentage of sales by psychographic segment. Wal-Mart has found that using psychographics is powerful for understanding and gaining greater insights into how their customers make trade-offs from one product to another (Tsai Lee, 2009). As the analysis shows, The Price Value Shopper visits Wal-Mart store up to ten times a month and is responsible for generating 16% of total revenue, in addition to delivering the majority of insights about which new products to stock and serving as the inspiration for making the vision and mission statements a reality across the global corporation (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012). The Price Value Shopper is also where Wal-Mart executives turn to for feedback on how they are doing and how their customer service is trending (Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012).
Figure 1: Wal-Mart Psychographics Segmentation
Based on an analysis of:
(Wal-Mart Investor Relations, 2012)
(Frazier, 2006)
The central role the Price Value Shopper plays in the ecosystem is a strong indication of how critical this customer base is to Wal-Mart, and how their needs have become the catalyst or galvanizing force that makes...
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