Me: Does the website help your business or hurt your business? What do your customers tell you about their impressions of the website?
WMT: They love it. And I really think it helps what we do at the store level. A lot of people don't really want to buy things over the Internet. But they want to shop. That brings them to the store to make their purchase, and this is something you can't do on Amazon or eBay or sites like that. The customers buy their Christmas presents online, and shop for themselves in the store. There's other people who probably shop online exclusively -- we might see them for their groceries but that's it. I think the website offers the same high quality experience you get in store, and it makes a fantastic complement to the in-store shopping experience.
Me: Are you aware of any unwanted or unintended images of your company on the Internet?
WMT: Wal-Mart does a lot of things right, and maybe that earns us some critics. But we don't worry about that. When you consider the traffic we generate from people shopping on Wal-Mart.com, that's far greater than anything else online about Wal-Mart.
Me: Do your competitors have a strong Internet presence? Do you find that competitive pressure is different online?
WMT: Our competitors are all online, but some do it better than others. We're aiming for Amazon on the web, because they're still bigger. But we're coming for them. At the end of the day, merchandising and competing on lower price are things that don't change that much. I'm sure the mechanics are a little bit different...
We have our own business to worry about. Even for the company, it hasn't changed the way the store run. There might be some issues with respect to distribution or the supply chain, but again I would not know much about that. Our Internet presence has not affected me much.
Me: What is your advertising strategy?
WMT: I think we have a great advertising strategy. Wal-Mart is a household name, and everybody knows that we stand for the lowest prices. So we have an advantage in that we don't need to advertise to get that basic message across. We can remind people about that, and we can highlight specific savings, and that is what we do. We use a number of different advertising tools to do this. We don't want to saturate the airwaves, except maybe at key times, but we definitely want to stay first and foremost in our customers' minds. In that way, we don't rest on our laurels. We respect our competition and we use a complex advertising strategy in order to stay on top.
Me: Do you advertise on other web sites?
WMT: We might, I don't know. We're the #3 shopping site for web traffic, so we do a pretty good job of bringing people to our site. But again, I mostly deal with the in-store stuff. I know only a little bit about the Internet marketing program. I am more concerned with how Internet ads bring people into my store, and what I can do to make those customers happy.
