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Introduction
Walmart appeals to a special type of customer: one who is looking to shop for bargains in a retail outlet center where virtually everything can be purchased—from groceries to fuel to oil changes. Walmart is a store where all products are stocked and ready to be sold for bottom dollar so that consumers can save money. This paper will examine this company’s typical consumer and assess how the business can obtain more data on the consumer in order to develop a strategy for increasing its business revenue.
Who are Walmart’s Consumers?
A graph of the breakdown of Walmart’s business says a lot about who its customers are. The chart below shows that most customers in Walmart are there to shop for groceries and consumables. Fuel and other categories make up the next biggest segment. Entertainment, apparel, home, and health products make up the other portion of products that customers at Walmart are buying. In other words, customers shopping at the retail giant and shopping for their everyday basic needs: but they are also looking for deals and cut rate prices that can help them to save money.
With total household income stagnating over the past 10 years (since the Great Recession of 2007), customers are looking for the things they need at the lowest possible prices—and that is the target customer that Walmart has in mind when the company goes to stock its shelves.
Source: FRED (2018)
In terms of rank order and segment, consumers who are doing their everyday grocery shopping and consumable items purchasing are the number one target for Walmart. These customers are also looking for deals that they can use to save money: “Wal-Mart reaches out to the lower, middle class and the poor in the society who strive to meet their daily needs. This category of the market is the largest in the US and many other countries where it operates. This policy has made it a very popular name in the US. It also confirms why the company has a retail outlet in every city in the country” (Ferrell & Hartline, 2008).
Key Customer Data
Key customer data used by Walmart includes...
The segmentation variables that Walmart utilizes include consumer behaviors as well as other variables demographics, geographical location, and psychographic characteristics. Walmart members have their purchases analyzed by the company so the business can identify trends in the shopping behaviors of its consumers. This helps the company to establish customer profiles that it can use to set up tracking measures to see how customers are responding to ads, to sales, to seasonal changes, and to the types of products that are offered. By analyzing customers’ Big Data, the company can also take advantage of web browsing information and online shopping mannerisms of its customers (McAfee et al., 2012; Swan, 2013; Wambler, 2015).
Customers who shop online want to be able to read about the product before they buy—and that includes both information provided by the producer as well as information provided by consumers. Customer reviews play a big part in how consumers shop—and Amazon has been very good about allowing customers to leave reviews and highlighting those reviews on its web pages. By analyzing customer reviews and obtaining information from surveys, interviews, and online questionnaires, the company also engages with consumers to find out what is important to them, what their shopping needs are and how they want their Walmart to best meet their desires.
Gathering Data from Employees
Employees serve as a great source of information when it comes to understanding customers. Employees are on the front lines, interacting with consumers and engaging with them on a daily basis. They hear consumers’ questions, they listen to their complaints, they receive their recommendations, and they see first-hand what customers are gravitating towards, what they are buying and what they are avoiding. Employees in Walmart stores know the customers because they see them every day. For corporate leaders in Walmart, interacting with employees and obtaining their views on who the customer is and what the customer wants can be one of the best ways to figure out the needs of the…
References
Chen, M. F., & Tung, P. J. (2014). Developing an extended theory of planned behavior model to predict consumers’ intention to visit green hotels. International journal of hospitality management, 36, 221-230.
Ferrell, O. C., & Hartline, M. D. (2008). Marketing strategy. Mason, OH: Thomson South Western.
FRED. (2018). Household income. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N McAfee, A., Brynjolfsson, E., Davenport, T. H., Patil, D. J., & Barton, D. (2012). Big data: the management revolution. Harvard Business Review, 90(10), 60-68.
Swan, M. (2013). The quantified self: Fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. Big Data, 1(2), 85-99.
Wambler, S. (2015). Relational Databases. Retrieved from http://www.agiledata.org/essays/relationalDatabases.html
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