Marketing Co -Op

The co-operative Food limited, which is one of the UK’s biggest food retailers, coming 5th place after other supermarket businesses. They have over 3,000 stores all located in the UK and in 1998 The Co-operative business, stocked Fair-trade products in most food stores. The co-operative is a large business and has many different sectors but our coursework will be based on the food section. In 2009 the co-operative group bought the Somerfield business meaning that they increased on the number of stores they now have. The businesses target market would be a very large market. The reason for this is that they sell all products for the different genders and different age groups. By this I mean that they sell products such as fresh groceries, this would be targeting parents and elder adults who like to cook and cook for families. This wouldn’t be targeting a teenager due to the fact that teenagers would rather eat McDonald’s. But they also sell products such as junk food and other products which once again would target a large audience both age/gender/ethnicity. Recently they have also introduced home delivery, which meant that customers could order their food online and would get it delivered directly to their address. Once again this is attracting another type of audience, which is a customer that may not have time to shop because they were at work but still can shop online and get the same products. The co-operative business is owned by the members of the co-operative which are 5.5million members. Their main base is located in Manchester, based in the UK. The co-operatives business first started in the year 1844, but the co-operative food business started in 1863. One of the types of promotion the co-operative mainly use is the sales promotion, to attract their customers. By using this type of promotion method they attract the right target market which in this situation would be parents. For example, if you look at the print screen shot below you can see they are