Wal-Mart and its Mid-Life Crisis
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Analyze the following case study:
Maich, S. (2004). Wal-Mart's mid-life crisis. Maclean's, 117(34), 45.
Include responses to the following questions in your analysis:
-Is it "mid-life crisis" or "mid-life laziness" that this article communicates about Wal-Mart's marketing? Did management " lose its way" and forget the concepts and tenets that made the company successful?
-How might Wal-Mart use holistic marketing to address its mid-life crisis?
-Match the facts of this case (poor growth by Wal-Mart, etc.) to the appropriate marketing management tasks. Can you see a relationship between Wal-Mart's symptoms and how well marketing management performed its tasks? Why or why not? A bar code with a slanting arrow depicting downfall.
-Write your case analysis in a 3-5 pages.
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Solution Summary
This solution of 839 words analyzes the case of Wal-Mart and its mid-life crisis and how the company 'lost its way' in achieving success. It also looks at how holistic marketing and also appropriate marketing management can remedy its crisis.
Solution Preview
Maich, S. (2004). Wal-Mart's mid-life crisis. Maclean's, 117(34), 45.
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-29/wal-marts-midlife-crisis
Include responses to the following questions in your analysis:
-Is it "mid-life crisis" or "mid-life laziness" that this article communicates about Wal-Mart's marketing? Did management "lose its way" and forget the concepts and tenets that made the company successful?
Management didn't lose its bearings but faced many different factors that resulted in losses to rival competitors and damages to the image of the company. Underlying economics of expansion, the lower price model, and other variables associated with marketing fallacies all resulted in Wal-Mart sagging in sales and rowt. Wal-Mart faced a precarious position at the time this article was written similar to Microsoft and McDonalds Corp. These companies were simply too big for their own size and building at unsustainable rates in regard to new stores that squeezed out competition and brought regulatory pressure as well as public backlash. Part of the problem was understaffed stores, stores located so close to existing ones that Wal-Mart ends up competing with itself. Wal-Mart should have cut way back on new-store building to concentrate instead on extracting more value from existing stores, but even this approach is questionable because Wal-Mart ...
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