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Strategy making,executing and implementing
Strategy evaluation
Strategy making,executing and implementing
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Strengthening Competitive Position
As part of a generic strategy, companies develop a competitive strategy and complement it with a strategic move to strengthen its competitive position. The strategic options are strategic alliances, collaborative partnership, mergers and acquisition, horizontal and vertical integration, initiate an offensive strategic move, employ defensive strategic move, the internet website strategy, and outsourcing (SNHU, 2016).
Complementary Strategic Moves
Target Corporation has developed many strategies to enhance its long-term growth prospects, particularly digital capabilities with a significant investment in technology and supply chain and repositioning healthier, fresher grocery that young and other shopper prefer (Target Roadmap, 2015). Target Corporation leverages opportunities such as a promotion of a brand name, promotion of store credit card discount appreciating customer loyalty and positions the store
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Target 's defensive strategy is to leverage the strength in the technology and the physical store to its advantage, pre-empt its rival in the order online, and store pickup a business model. Target 's competitors in the online space are Amazon and Walmart with Amazon dominating the industry. Target 's defensive strategy to counter Amazon is, to abandon the minimum $25 purchase for free shipping qualification to boost traffic to its online portal.
According to Schafer (2013), Target Corporation desire is not to be like Amazon, but improves Target Brand and be a better version of Target with an incremental product and services. Target Corporation acquired Chefs Catalog and Cooking.com to counter any threat from other rival online retailers and the acquisition came with a new product brand that is popular and allows Target Corporation to cross promote between Target and the new entity strengthening its
Target and Nordstrom’s are set up mainly as department stores in which product lines are organized in departments to be occupied by specific buyers and sellers. While Nordstrom is arguably the premier retailer of a wide variety of clothing, shoes, and accessories that land on the high end of what most would call “affordable,” Target would be considered the store for people who are middle class. The legendary “half-yearly” sales for men, and the additional markdowns that usually follow a sale section that is usually decently well stocked. The designer brand list has wild range in-house brands like Gucci, Prada, and the plain old Nordstrom line offer more than a few items with incredible looks and high quality for very reasonable prices. Its website is clean and easy
As compared to its rivals, Target has presented its brand as a middle-class brand which assists in attracting customers that find other stores like Walmart unpleasant
Target has many competitors in the market, and the level of competition is highly intense. Some of its main rivals are Wal-Mart stores, Home Depot and Costco Wholesale Corp. All of them produce similar products as well as offer almost the same services to their consumers. Naturally, the organization would need a strategy that helps it to stand out and to distinguish it from its competitors, thus, Target 's positioning was based on more than just pricing; it combined quality and style. This was the differentiation strategy that have always been applied since the launch of the organization.
According to www.targetcorp.com, Target is an upscale discount retail chain that sells quality products at attractive prices, and prides itself on clean, spacious, and guest-friendly stores. Target is the second largest "general merchandise" retailer (behind Wal-Mart); selling almost anything one would need to complete the "one stop shop", especially with the addition of the SuperTarget stores. The first Target opened in Roseville, Minnesota in 1962. Since then, 1,330 stores located in forty-seven different states, which includes the 141 SuperTarget stores, have opened nationwide. Target also has twenty-two distribution centers located in nineteen states. In addition to the vast number of store locations, Target also has other businesses that include: Target.com, Target Financial Services, Associated Merchandising Corporation, and Target commercial Interiors. Through all the key businesses, Target employs nearly 300,000 people from diverse backgrounds. The current Chairman and CEO of Target is Bob Ulrich.
In 2013, Target acquired 124 locations in Canada from a failing retailer called Zellers (Wahpa, 2015). Target began to experience major problems. The Zellers store locations were in awful locations, which was one of the reasons Zellers was failing. Target began to suffer from supply-chain problems that yielded empty shelves and high prices, and it added up to a downright disaster. According to Taylor & Ho (2013) Canadian shoppers were disappointed with prices above those it charges in the United States, and shoppers would rather go to Canadian Wal-Mart. Target began losing millions of dollars, CEO Gregg Steinhafe turned his attention away from Target Locations in the United States and focused his attention on the Target locations in Canada. A year after Target had begun operating in Canada they lost over one billion dollars (Taylor & Ho, 2013). In January of 2015, Target Canada was placed under bankruptcy protection, underscoring the severity of the mistake by one of the largest retailers in the
In December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many would not expect to see and happen to any major retailer/corporation.
The significance for a company to be able to leverage their product and category management systems within their firm can be vital to the success of the company. In order to be able to improve, the company must understand their current practices, and acknowledge the areas that they can do better in. To be able to make adjustments to their current business practices that Target has for their coffee, category management techniques should be looked into. Learning more about the target market that they are trying to reach, allows them to properly provide the correct product mix for their customers. For Target to improve, they should assess their current techniques and pursue research that allows Target to become more efficient as a firm. While also increasing sales, Target can increase customer satisfaction, and add value to external/internal stakeholders.
Target Corporation is the biggest discount retailing business in the US which comes just after Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The headquarters are located in Minneapolis in Minnesota in the USA. George Dayton founded it. It initially started as a family business with a regional retailer shop and later grew into a national full retailer store. The company’s main aim is to offer retail services at friendly rates and, its main attracting feature is discount rates offed on different products in the business. The company has indicated tremendous growth in the retail business. It has a target to outgrow its market and achieve competitive advantage over its competitors. This essay seeks to discuss the competitive analysis and
1. The Discount Department Store. Target prefers to be called as the latter instead of just department store. Expect more, pay less. With this tagline, the customers expect to purchase more items and pay the least amount possible. Not like other retail industries like its competitor Kmart and Wal-Mart, Target maintains retail value in terms of product offerings. They are known in their designer’s items in clothes, exclusive beauty products, categorized and functional goods, and seasonal offerings. It also sells the greatest number of gift cards among its rival business.
Spokane Industries has contracted Franklin Electronics for an 18 month product development contract. Franklin Electronics is new to using project management methodologies and has not been exposed to earned value management methodologies. Even though Franklin and Spokane have worked together in the past, they have mainly used fixed-price contracts with little to no stipulations. For this project, Spokane Industries is requiring Franklin Electronics to use formalized project management methodologies, earned value cost schedules, and schedules for reports and meetings. Since Franklin Electronics had no experience with earned value management, the cost accounting group was trained in the methodology in order to bid for the project.
With Target facing the showrooming effect, Target is pressuring its vendors to provide specialty products that will be privy to only Target (Kinicki & Williams, 2013). By having products that cannot be found elsewhere, shoppers will no longer have the advantage of on line shopping the same product. In addition, Target is asking the vendors to decrease prices so that customers will not have the advantage of locating the product elsewhere for a lower price.
The recruitment, interviewing, selecting and orienting of any large retail company can be daunting if the company doesn’t have a concrete plan that works across the nation. Target has 1,807 stores in the United States, and currently have 323,000 team members. (Target.com)
The distinction between Target and Wal-Mart are more so about a lower price. Target advantage over Wal-Mart lower prices is that consumers have a chance to save cartwheel five dollar gift cards. When a consumer purchases certain items of the week at a certain amount in return receives a cartwheel gift card is given to be used towards the next purchase. Another advantage every time a consumer used Target credit card for purchase they receive a five percent discount. For some, believe that Target products are priced higher but have better products and online services for consumers as
Managing for competitive Advantage - is the ability of an organization to produce goods or services more effectively than other competitors (Kinicki and Williams, 2016). Target has maintain stability for many years but because of this showrooming issues Target has to follow through with their plan of making special products that can’t be duplicated by other competitors. I also think that anyone that enters into a Target store should be greeted by an agent that will offer great deals and different incentives that might make the customer want to stay and purchase items in the store. It is important to be responsive to customers while making them feels as if they just won the lottery or receive a major big deal that made them feel so good that they would come back over and over again. This will keep the customer intrigued while promoting great deals by letting their friends and family know about the great deal they obtain. Innovation and quality is also important in this case. Target new something new and different that would make their product stands out from
Malware was used by hackers to invade the company’s data (Kinicki & Williams. 2016). Target should have had more plans and technology to not only catch this malware was present before the breach they should have also acknowledged the breach as soon as they were for told. If I was advising Target I would suggest that they immediately work to find and utilize tools that could prevent this from happening again.