Market Segmentation of Walmart

Walmart is currently the most famous retail corporation which operates a chain of hypermarkets (supercenters). Their high-quality products, discount department stores, and grocery stores are what gain the customers’ attention. Walmart has remained true to its goal during its 50 years of history and has always sought to offer its consumers affordable daily costs, and as a result, Walmart has created a solid and loyal client base. Customers who enter any Walmart shop know their prices are low.

Before moving forward, let’s look at one of Walmart’s recent posts on their Instagram and thus try to understand what is their Brand Archetype.

Posts with captions showing how much the company cares about their customers have an emotional impact, but posts regarding little kids or newborn babies take another level. In the picture, we can see a woman, most probably she is the nanny of the baby she is feeding. We see both of them smiling; the baby most probably enjoys drinking milk from that bottle and at the same time playing with it. And the woman is glad to see that the baby wants the drink.

The primary idea of this post is to show that Walmart takes care of all their customers and offer a great variety of products. Moreover, Walmart offers high-quality products at affordable prices to have excellent and fresh products no matter their social conditions.

Thus, Walmart takes the role of Caregiver.

Let’s see what the main aspects of this Brand Archetype are.

Desire: Taking good care of people/customers;

Goal: Help as many people as they can;

Fear: Selfishness;

Strategy: Make others’ lives easier.

What messages we can get from this Brand Archetype?

Level One: Seeing someone in trouble;

Level Two: Care and support;

Level Three: Self-care balance with attention to others;

Level Four: Altruism and the wider world.

The Caregiver is a promising brand name

• for the customer service provides the competitive advantage to support families (from fast-food to small-scale cars);
• or to support services in health, education, care (including politics), such as cookies which help people remain interconnected and care for each other.

Now, let us analyze the position of Walmart from a different perspective; what kind of customers do they target?

Usually, we analyze the brand’s segmentation to clearly understand the type of customers the company loves to work with and to whom they would like to offer their high-quality services. And to do so, let’s watch one of Walmart’s commercials.

The commercial starts with a fun and enthusiastic melody. We can see two women (probably relatives) who had just arrived back home from Walmart. Both of them were holding a huge back full of food which makes the viewer understand that something is going to take place (let’s say, a family gathering). One of the women looked out of the kitchen window to see what the other family member was doing. It is quite challenging to say who they are to each other exactly, but one thing we can say for sure is that they are in a good relationship with each other.

In two or three seconds, the background suddenly changes, and we can hear the song “My House” by Flo Rida, which has a significant meaning. We will come back to the soundscape at the end of the commercial analysis.

Moving forward, we see different scenes of these three people cooking fresh and tasty meatballs for the burgers and extra fresh food and vegetables thoroughly washed and set to the table in the table. Then came their guests; family and friends. Everyone was having a great time enjoying lovely, fresh and tasty homemade food.

Now, let’s connect the chosen song “My House” by Flo Rida with the scenes. So, the main significant idea of that song is chorus – “Welcome to My Home”, which repeats in the commercial over and over again. That is precisely what we see throughout the whole commercial, basically. We see genuine happy, and positive emotions that the main characters share with each other. When we look at those people, words that might come to our minds are love, happiness and unity.

But what exactly united those people together? What is that one thing that makes them feel so good?

Yes, we all love big gatherings with our loved ones. We all enjoy having some conversations with them and enjoying delicious food at the same time. Walmart cares about their customers a lot.  No matter people’s financial and social status, the company works so that any kind of family can afford such a wonderful gathering with the loved ones.

At this stage, this statement helps us to conclude that Walmart’s ideal type of customer is the Sharer – people who enjoy even the little things in life and share their positivity with others.

Sounds interesting, isn’t it?

Now, let’s try to gain a better understanding of who the Sharer is.

Lifestyle, Attitude and Values:

Sharer is someone who desires to fully enjoy life, all aspects of it. These people love to take risks. They accept different challenges. Sharers positively carry their daily tasks and routines. They take care of their loved ones, close people and parents.

Even ordinary daily shopping makes them happy. However, they never get carried away with their optimism and positive energy; they know their budget limit, and generally, they are very good with money. However, if something catches their attention at the supermarket, they lose self-control and buy it (such things happen to many of us though ?).

Besides shopping, they are fond of cooking as well. They always make sure the food is tasty and that the family eats appropriately.  They are ready to pay more for high-quality organic and environmentally-friendly products just for the sake of taking care of their parents and loved ones’ health.

However, they take care of themselves too! They care about their looks and health. Sharers try to dress fashionably; they exercise both for their health and keep fit or lose weight if needed.

Leisure and Activities:

Sharers love spending a lot of time in and around their homes. They love to get lost in some housework inside or outside their houses; they take care of their garden, which is an ultimate enjoyment. Moreover, they enjoy fixing different random things. For example, room painting, putting up shelves, ornamental works.

Also, they love watching movies and reading magazines. For them, genre does not really matter. Whether it’s action, thriller, romantic, family or cartoon, they enjoy watching all of them.

Sharers love spending time at home, but they tend to go out sometimes as well. For instance, they might decide to go to fast-food restaurants, cafes, wine bars, pubs. Although they rarely go to theatres, operas, art exhibitions and other cultural events, they would rather watch those programs at home.

Some other interesting facts about the Sharers:

• They rarely go on holiday or any other short trips. They don’t travel much abroad.
• Sharers are brand oriented and knowledgeable.

Although their living standard is low, they use premium brands whenever possible because they care a lot about the quality of the products that they are using. For them, quality has much more critical meaning rather than quantity.

• Media is another world for them:

They read a lot about lifestyle, entertainment and celebrity topics. Topics about health and beauty, home and garden, clothing and fashion, film and video have an essential role.

Society, politics, economy is not their priority, though. They are not really interested in those topics. They rarely follow the news; local, country or international events.

Last but not least, let’s dig into the Marketing Mix of Walmart.

Product

A broad range of products is sold by Walmart stores. You bring what customers desire to the market. It’s easier than trying to introduce innovative products to sell and promote people’s desires. Walmart uses the following strategies to select its product mix:

• In nearly every category, they offer an extensive range of products. These range from food, equipment, furnishings, equipment, medical supplies, wellness and entertainment;
• They buy in massive amounts to gain discounts and scale savings;
• They have a good connection with their suppliers;
• Products from Walmart white labels are then only sold in Walmart stores.

Price

The price of a product affects its success in the future and long-term continuation. The results of sales and the competitiveness of the product in the market are determined. The profit per unit sold will be pretty high when the product is highly pricey. On the other hand, the demand is higher if prices are low. Companies can either go high, low or low-volume, high-volume. In the following ways, Walmart has improved its price position:

• Friendly prices for customers and a strong focus on mass selling to boost sales instead of price excesses;

• The organization can deal with the most accessible supply chain actors to keep prices down. Excellent procurement practices;
• Diversification enables the sales of other products can be driven by complementary commodities if one is not pushed;
• Universal barcoding and SKU systems enable a more efficient and cheaper pricing supply chain;
• Various buy alternatives are capable of paying cash and paying for larger purchases (such as appliances or furniture).

Place

In any company enterprise, location is crucial. Customers are essential components of business positioning and geographical accessibility. To ensure that all variables associated with the place as a marketing mix element are efficient and effective, Walmart uses numerous strategies:

• A robust e-commerce platform that enables customers to buy things without actual visits;
• A well-planned network of distribution hubs, making collecting and delivering their products straight to consumers easier for stores;
• Advanced IT systems make it possible for the company to trace products, whether in transit or stock.

Promotion

The techniques used by an organization to attract or inform the public about its product are promotional strategies.

• Walmart holds frequent promotions and offers all-season savings;
• The shop utilizes the same slogans as “saves money and lives better,” “lowest prices,” “worried fresh”, and “low prices daily.”;
• Walmart uses a diverse range of publicity media, including TV ads, pictures, social media, and even its eCommerce platform;
• They provide safe means of transportation that guarantee customers who buy online the most superb quality of service.

To conclude, we successfully managed to learn a lot about Walmart. Based on their vision and mission statements and their advertisement on their social media, we finalized their Brand Archetype as a Caregiver and looked deeper into its main features. Moving forward, we found out their ideal type of customers, the Sharer, and we concluded with a deep analysis of their Marketing Mix.

Based on the results, it is worth mentioning that these statistics show that Walmart really cares about their customers in any possible way. Most importantly, these are not just words. Their actions are the proof of their words. Indeed, Walmart deserves the popularity that it has today.

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