Swot Analysis Canadian Tire

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

The Canadian Tire Corporation as an organization has many strengths. The primary strength for the success of Canadian Tire is there strong and loyal customer base. They gained this customer base through their long history as a Canadian company, as many of their existing Canadian competitors have given in to being purchased by foreign corporations. They also have one of the most recognizable trademarks in the country. Another strength Canadian Tire does so well at is its diversity. Currently they provide such a wide range of products and services to their customers; including automobile parts anjd services, financial services, clothing, hardware, houseware and more. They also have one of the longest running customer rebate programs of any retailer, which is the Canadian Tire money that the customers receive after making their purchases. 

Weaknesses

A major weakness of Canadian Tire is that they have periodically lost their focus on customer service in the past. They have taken their customers for granted, assuming that the customer would always return to the store regardless of how they treated them. Due to taking customers for granted they have occasionally lost market share. Another weakness is that they have failed to recognize and adapt to the changing demographic of Canada, including immigration and different cultures. Canadian Tire tend to focus on its original historical customer which is an adult white male, rather than widening the focus to women and different nationalities such as Chinese and Indian customers. This has put limits on the company and is the primary reason the company has been unsuccessful in its attempts to expand beyond Canada.

Opportunities

Canadian Tire has a very unique opportunity to take advantage on their status as a home grown Canadian retailer. In recent years most of the other Canadian competitors have been purchased by forighn organizations, making it easy for the company to continue to use national pride as a focus in advertising campeigns to remind Canadians to support the Canadian company, unlike most of its competitors.

Threats

A main threat to the retail store is its competition. Canadian tire has many strong competitors in its wide variety areas of service, the main retail threats to Canadian tire are hardware stores such as home depot, auto service stores such as Kal-tire as well as specialty houseware stores and department stores like Sears and The Bay. While these types of competitors can focus on their area of expertise, Canadian Tire with such variety must spread their focus to all areas of the retail stores products. Another threat the company deals with is on customer service and how they often tend to lose their focus about how customers in this high competition market need to be a top priority of focus in order to stay a top retailer, and keep the loyal customer base. With so many other options of stores to go out there no customer will come back if their experience was a negative one.