Table of Contents
Executive summary
Morrison’s is the fourth largest supermarket chain in the UK. Its competitive position has been assessed throughout the marketing audit presented below. As the findings suggest, the company is vulnerable to number of forces in the internal and the external environment, most notably the competition and the declining sales.
Introduction
The UK economy has suffered significant blows during the aftermath of the most recent financial crisis. While the conditions have been gradually improving, the bailouts of the country’s largest banks, the failures in the measures to balance the budget and decrease the unemployment, have produced significant uncertainties (Lehmann, 2012). This on the other hand has impacted the retail industry negatively, and today there are discussions that the UK’s economy is sliding back in to a recession.
While the sales of the durable goods have been suffering, it seems that the grocery and the soft goods sales have been maintained. In this environment, the largest retailers in the country, who have the multiproduct focus, have been weathering the storm little better.
UK’s supermarket industry is dominated by the few large retailers, who own almost 79% of the market (Vasquez-Nicholson, 2011). Among them, Morrison’s is the fourth largest retailer as shown in the graph 1 below.
Figure : Companies with the largest market shares in the UK 's supermarket industry (Czinkota, 2004)
Main findings External analysis using PESTEL and Porter’s five forces
The PESTEL model will help analyze the general environment in the multiple prisms. It focuses on the six macro factors in the business environments. Figure 2 below shows the factors in the order they will be discussed.
Political atmosphere; the government policies have been long focused on the mix of the high and low skill job opportunities development throughout the country. Morrison’s on the other hand, has
References: Belasco, W. J., & Horowitz, R. (2009) Food chains: from farmyard to shopping cart. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Buzby, J. C. (2009) Supermarket loss estimates for fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, poultry, and seafood and their use in the ERS loss-adjusted food availability data. Washington, D.C. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. Czinkota, M. R. (2004) Mastering global markets: strategies for today 's trade globalist. Mason, OH: Thomson/Southwestern. Deru, M. P. (2010) Wal-Mart experimental store performance stories. Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Hill, C. W.L. (2007) International Business-competing in the global market, McGraw-Hill. King, R. P. (2004) Supermarket characteristics and operating costs in low-income areas. Washington, D.C. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. Lehmann, C. F. (2012) Strategy and business process management: techniques for improving execution, adaptability, and consistency. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Lichtenstein, N. (2006) Wal-Mart: the face of twenty-first-century capitalism. New York: New Press. Luo, Y. (2002) Capability exploitation and building in a foreign market: implication for multinational enterprises. Organization Science, 13(1), 48-63 Morrisons (2012) Annual report and financial statements Neo, D. (2003) Big Is Beautiful: When it comes to the supermarket retail sector in China, size definitely matters. Asia Pacific Food Industry. OFT (2006) The grocery market