Wal-Mart

Steinway & Sons achieved competitive advantage in the market by applying differentiation strategy. Steinway pianos are regarded to be the highest quality in the market, which made the Steinway brand more prestigious than competitors. Steinway used differentiation strategy by striving for technical excellence, creating a niche brand and most importantly by putting quality over quantity: an approximate duration of building a Steinway grand piano is 2 years; which made the piano exclusive and desirable to both professionals and affluent customers. By using traditional craftsmanship with minimal use of machinery Steinway has created a traditional veblen brand with a strong brand culture. Steinway developed this brand culture firstly by naming the company Steinway & Sons, which indicates brand being a generational family business and by building pianos with specific dimensions. Rather than offering various pianos sizes it has followed the same principles throughout years it focused and specialised on grand and vertical pianos. In 1992 Birmingham Brothers who controlled Steinway at the time decided to launch Boston piano range to target a different customer segment in order to generate more cash flow and compete with lower prices of rival brands, this threatened the Steinway’s culture since Boston pianos were cheaper range assembled in Japan. Brothers have also downsized the network of distributors and created a network of communication with committed distributors only, which lowered the costs of transportation. Wal-Mart’s strategy is consisted of two elements: low cost and high volume, which positioned the brand as “always low prices” in consumers’ perception. Wal-Mart’s IT tactic made the company a pioneer in the market which gave company more value, no other retail or discount chains were using IT at the time and Wal-Mart had successfully created a database in which suppliers could view the current inventory levels of their products in each store and plan inventory shipment accordingly, with the use of just in time inventory strategy Wal-Mart eliminated stock problems, increased efficiency and decreased waste, thus overall reduced costs of inventory. Another tactic used by Wal-Mart is choice of location, being the “big box” in the region. Instead of big cities, stores were located in small towns and rural areas in central U.S., by adopting this tactic Wal-Mart achieved to fill a gap in the market and maximised sales density. It also focused on customer experience the database of it is the 2nd largest in the world and monitored customer behaviour to plan layouts of products and merchandise mix to achieve higher sales volume. Unlike competitors such as K-Mart and Target, Wal-Mart focused on offering various range of product categories, such as groceries, hard goods and soft goods. Contrary to competitors Wal-Mart put more emphasis on hard goods, since they generated more sales per square. Culture of Wal-Mart distinguished the company from others it is an inclusive workplace where employees are called associates, it serves to local charities and contributes to communities.

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