Leadership case study analysis

Leadership Case

Walmart decline in sales

Key issues

The major issues in the case study are the acute decline in the sales that Walmart was making just before Duke got into office and also the decline in the number of clients who visited the stores. The other issue was the seemingly erratic decisions made in remodeling the displays within the stores as was in expanding the space within the stores at the expense of the goods to be displayed, in effect reducing sales.

Root causes

The causes of these above challenges are extrinsic and some internal, for instance the drop in the sales generally in all the stores was caused by a downturn in the economic trends within the entire nation that was occasioned by the global recession. This left people from all sectors of the economy with lesser money to spend hence tightened their budgeting and focused only on the very essential goods. The second root cause is the singular decision making process where the top executive decided on his own to rearrange the store floor display without extensive consultations with the staff on the floor and the customers.

Possible solutions

Bearing that the economic downturn was a universal phenomenon, there is ned in this case to have the store concentrate on the goods that the customers need most at the recession time and help make them accessible in order to boost sales on the essentials as a compensatory approach. The displays should have actually bee beefed up rather than reducing in order to expose the customers to the highest number of merchandise in order for them to get influenced into buying. There is need hence to have a wider range of products and even introduce special categories in order to get the attention of the customers more.

Advantages and disadvantages

The advantage of having more displayed is that there is a likelihood of increasing the influence over the clients to buy and increasing the number of the essential goods that the clients always bought at the end of the month is that it will ensure no client walks out for lack of stock hence tapping into all the possible client purchases.

The disadvantage of the expansion of the display is the risk of crowding the floor to an extent that the customers may feel uncomfortable waling through and having hard time shopping with comfort. Overemphasizing on the essential goods is that the customers may be swayed away from the other complementary goods which they could otherwise buy once in a while despite the hard economic times.

Final recommendations

There is need for the chain of stores to deeply study the consumption trend and dialogue with the customers and the staff so that instead of having eliminated some goods from the store, they should adopt a customer oriented approach to arranging the store in a manner that lures people to buy more from the store in a wider range of goods, customer needs need to be catered for.

Questions from the book

1. Walmart emphasized the growth strategy since they tried introducing new products than were there before the entry of Duke and also introducing new features to their display (Suttle R., 2014).

2. The growth strategies are very significant since Duke is focused on expanding the brand name and a brand community abroad as well as introducing radically new measures that will see the expansion of the merchandise that Walmart will deal in henceforth. Hence the strategies are to a great extent indeed touching on the strategic decisions and plans of the top management.