Walmart Wal-Mart\'s Domestic and Global Marketing Challenges

Walmart

Wal-Mart's Domestic and Global Marketing Challenges

Wal-Mart is at once one of the most visible retail firms in the world and one of the most consistently criticized. Due to its poor record on labor rights, its deleterious impact on local communities and businesses, and its various ethical sacrifices in the name of everyday low prices, Wal-Mart's marketing challenges generally center on these shortcomings in its domestic and global reputation. A consideration of the environmental circumstances impacting Wal-Mart's marketing conditions reveals a company a number of vulnerabilities to public impression but also with great opportunities to make improvements in this area.

One area in which balance is needed is that of global trade. In this context, Wal-Mart has established a level of global interdependence that demands relatively unregulated production in developing world contexts. It is this interdependence -- whereby its low everyday prices rely on the undercutting of labor and environmental costs -- that has most recently caused Wal-Mart to run afoul of U.S. trade law. According to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, it is illegal to bribe officials from other countries for reasons of advancing a business.

However, Savage (2012) tells, Wal-Mart has been guilty of transgressing this Act. Accordingly, "Wal-Mart reported the violations to the Justice Department late last year after learning of The Times's preliminary reporting. It has hired outside firms to conduct an investigation and said it was reporting their findings to the government. It has also stressed that the ostensible graft detailed by The Times took place more than six years ago." (Savage, p. 1) In one regard, such acts of bribery highlight the cultural differences that often define business interaction in a global context. The Mexican government's relative instability has not simply made it vulnerable to bribery. Indeed, this instability denotes that bribery is an inherent and necessary aspect of conducting business in the North American country.

However, the U.S. Justice Department argues, acquiescence to such corruption only functions to improve the influence of inherently corrupt, unequal and unethical political systems. According to the Virginian Pilot (2012), "ultimately, bribery strengthens corrupt foreign governments, drives up the costs of goods for U.S. consumers and damages America's image abroad." (Virginian Pilot, p. 1) In many ways, Wal-Mart has been a major contributor to this trend by seizing on the opportunities made available by corrupt governments to operate with relative impunity.