Kroger Is a Very Successful

¶ … Kroger is a very successful supermarket chain. It reported U.S.$76.7 billion in sales during fiscal year 2009. It is America's largest grocery store chain and is expanding despite a crippling recession ("Grocery chains," 2011). It has been particularly successful in the opening and operation of hypermarket type of chains to rival Sam's Club, Walmart and similar stores that offer grocery, retail and a number of other types of shopping and even restaurant experiences under one roof without having to go to a mall.

Initial Capstone Project Proposal Scenario

The scenario is that the MBA capstone student is a new manager of a newly opened Kroger hypermarket store. The new manager has been tasked to performing a marketing survey of the local area I order to carry the proper complement of products. The Kroger company believes that by operating its divisions under banners that maintain strong local ties and brand equity, it will leverage more market share.. The company has historically made strategic acquisition of strong local operations a priority has kept merchandising decisions closest to the customers. The store has set up a basic organizational plan and major brand lines . The capstone project will be to run a focus group study to check this plan with the local population and to provide guidance on locally dictated market changes.

Project Methodology and Design

The manager will need to be in close cooperation with the focus group that will actually do the interviews with the people who have been chosen to be interviewed in the focus group studies. The manager will be responsible for writing the interview questions. The focus group will be carried out in an open format in an interview room with two-way glass. The manager will be speaking to the interviewer during the individual interviews to keep the interviewer on track and to raise on the spot questions that occur to him during the course of an individual interview. The questions about products will be pulled from the existing Kroger product line that are currently on the shelves in the store where the author currently works. In this way, the product questions are topical, current and focused upon the actual Kroger product line.

Before entering the focus group interview phase, the manager will write the questions and print them on customer response questionnaires passed out in the stores. The respondents who fill out the survey questionnaires in the store to prepare for the full focus group interviews will receive a Kroger gift certificate. The individuals that are interviewed in the recorded sessions will be paid for their time, with an individual interview requiring about an hour to complete. The key will be to develop open-ended questions about key products that are being introduced in the hypermarket store.

Data Analysis

The study will last anywhere from six months to one year, depending on the cash flow results from the store front. Those cash flow results will determine the formulation and reformulation of questions (to make sure that the questions are on target) driven by the products that are being introduced and withdrawn from the store shelves and also regarding customer attitudes about non-grocery services such as the Redbox Video kiosks, retail product lines and the pizza and other restaurants onsite. The cash flow results and the results of the surveys will also determine which products or services are pulled and/or replaced from the Kroger hypermarket storefront.