Solutions for Wal-Mart in Germany
The development of Wal-Mart in Germany is perhaps one of the locations whereby the Wal-Mart company has implemented effective solutions to its overseas market challenges. One of the ways that Wal-Mart was sure it would capture the German customers was on customer service; this was an aspect that the Wal-Mart had prided itself back in America. The Wal-Mart company believed and became certain that service was going to be a vital issue after the publishing of a report before the entry of Wal-Mart into the market of Germany.
The report was published and written by Arthur Anderson and it revealed that the merchants of Germany were the slightest accommodating in all the countries in Europe in requisites of customer service. Instead, German was already installed with discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl. As a result, the Wal-Mart in Germany wanted to use the customer service to differentiate them from the other markets and its competitors. Just like most of the Wal-Mart companies overseas, the aspect of customer service was met with various challenges. After the rebranding of the stores in Germany, customer services were introduced in many ways one of them being the. However, the “Wal-Mart greeters” brought about cultural misunderstandings in their stores.
This was not successful like it was back in the United States. The customers in the Wal-Mart Germany found the “Wal-Mart greeters” excessively superficial and as a result some of the stores had towithdraw the service (Christian 14).Management has also been a solution to the troubled Wal-Mart in Germany. The company was able to come up with a new organizational; culture whereby the workers in the stores felt that they were given respect unlike before and with other competitors. In these stores, the ideas, suggestions and opinions of the employees to meet the demands of the customers were listened to and the best were implemented. These were few stores that had transparency among the employers and the employees.
For instance, the single shopping night was an interesting example that was suggested upon by one of the employers in the need to save the company that was about to collapse to the new environment of Germany that had customers who were used to different marketing and purchasing trends(Christian 15). The “single shopping night” was a social action to the customers that was supposed to e of economic significances to the Wal-Mart stores. This was started in a store in a Wal-Mart store in Dortmund, Germany. It was an idea of two floor employees who thought that it would be a good way for single customers to find new partners, for the I individuals who thought that they were very old to do internet dating and other forms of finding new partners. Due to the environment of this development, the story of the single shopping has been documented well and all the reports on the sales of these stores indicate that it has had a positive impact on the profits.
In acctual fact, the Wal-Mart officials said that following the establishment of the “singles night” profits on Friday nights had improved by 25%. Despite the fact that single nights was quite comical action in marketing their products. There have been a success as customers who do not normally shop in Wal-Mart have been attracted; the officials added that they were familiar of more tat fifty couples who hooked up at Wal-Mart during the “singles night” shopping. The singles shopping night was put into operation nationwide in Germany to be the 13th of February, and was identified by Wal-Mart internationally as being successful, after this the Wal-Mart Canada and the Wal-Mart Korea contacted the Wal-Mart Germany for operational news (Christian 17)The above solutions for the challenges faced wit the Wal-Mart in china and Germany are good evidences of how the Wal-Mart international researches on a location and then finds an appropriate approach to the challenges. In Germany, the Wal-Mart uses the strategy of differentiating itself from its fierce competitors which has shown success with time.
In the Chinese market, the Wal-Mart international demonstrates that the challenges were due to the fact that the company was not able to perform like it normally did. This was to due the external challenges in terms of the products and sourcing. Consequently, the company had to find solutions which were to give the customers what they wanted instead of what they company usually provided.
