Kinko\'s Market and Business Growth

Kinko's Market And Business Growth

Kinko's marketing strategies have gone through a fundamental re-definition and broadening as the chain of stores has grown in scope from primarily serving college campuses, to serving small businesses and eventually entire enterprises. Having been founded near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970 where the first Kinko's sold copying services, supplies including stationary and school supplies, an unmet need that quickly led to the store chain growing to 24 locations in 1975 and 74 locations in 1979. During this initial growth period the company concentrated on college campuses, often creating marketing campaigns and programs aligning with the semester and tri-semester systems of the universities they co-located next to (Troy, 2007). As the chain continued growing throughout the 1980s, reaching 800 stores by 1994, the marketing strategies had shifted to small businesses and home-based businesses that needed advanced printing, publishing, and electronic document services. It was during this period that the company invested in a technology infrastructure that would create a technology platform or infrastructure that turned out to be instrumental in the company's long-term ability to grow quickly and scale operations well. During this period the company also relocated to Dallas, Texas and aggressively began adding more services to expand its market and also attract larger businesses that had shown an interest in outsourcing their copying and printing needs. Kinko's also began offering teleconferencing and video conferencing services, greater support for production-level duplication and production, and began to actively market to the sales department of Fortune 1,000 companies. During this period a strategic alliance was also created with Adobe to support their enterprise-level content management and forms technologies (Michelson, 2007) and also was initially approached by Federal Express as an acquisition. In 2004, the acquisition of Kinko's by Federal Express was complete, and the chain began to expand globally, first into Japan. As Federal Express often serves as a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for many of the Fortune 1,000 companies and has begun changing the unique value proposition of Kinko's to concentrate on being a provider of shipping services as well. As can be seen from this introduction, Kinko's marketing strategy has gone through fundamental and significant shifts over time, with the acquisition by Federal Express significantly changing the marketing strategies to become more of an extension of the Fed Ex core business model (Rynecki, 2004). In fact in 2008 Federal Express changed the name of Fed Ex Kinko's to Federal Express Office.

Analyzing Phases of Kinko's Marketing Strategies

From their initial marketing strategy of concentrating on competing with student bookstores and on-campus student supplies services to becoming more concentrated on small business needs (Wines, 1996) Kinko's began to embrace small businesses as a new target market during the early 1980s and continued to grow this marketing strategy through the 1990s. What was critical however for Kinko's in modifying their marketing strategy from students to small businesses was the focus on rapid service, cost savings and expanding services that aided their customers become more efficient in getting their projects done. These core process areas were critical for the company to transition from being only tied to universities and expand instead into the much larger and more lucrative small business market (Rynecki, 2004).

The transition from small business to enterprises began when Kinko's began investing in an it infrastructure that could provide electronic document delivery throughout the nation instantaneously on, in addition to the gradual move into shipping and delivery services of documents. In effect the move in marketing strategies from small business to the enterprise was nurtured and made possible by the enterprise content management infrastructure the company had created in the early 1990s. This technological strength that emerged and the demand for it as a service transformed Kinko's marketing strategy from a regional to a national focus. Second, the national branding efforts also began reaching critical mass as the number of stores approaches 800, and new store launch events began to dominate the business press. This content management infrastructure also was a key reason for Federal Express acquiring the company as well (Rynecki, 2004).

Improving Federal Express Kinko's (Federal Express Office) Marketing Strategy