Tag Archive 'Learn From Competitors'

  • The First Information-Age CEO?

  • The tremendous growth of Wal-Mart can be attributed to more than store location and Moon Pies. In fact, a key part of the Wal-Mart story is how the company won the information technology race. Although he needed some convincing at first, Walton soon grasped the importance of harnessing information technology in order to cut costs [...]

  • A Key to Double-Digit Growth: Stay Product-Driven

  • While store location and low prices were part of Walton’s model, so too was the concept of merchandising. Deep down, Sam Walton thought of himself as a merchant first. "In Wal-Mart stores they don’t want many brands," explains Philip Kotler, confirming Walton’s strong instincts for merchandising. "Basically, Wal-Mart features only a few brands, where they [...]

  • Walton’s Small-Town Strategy

  • One of the critical ingredients in Wal-Mart’s success was Walton’s selection of store locations. Walton made the decision to place Wal-Marts in small-town America, even in places where the population appeared to be too small to support the store. Other large discounters, such as Kmart, believed that a trade territory of 50,000 people was the [...]

  • Faithful to the Vision: Lowest Prices

  • Walton received early confirmation that he had a winning formula: It soon became clear that customer loyalty to a given retailer was mostly fiction. Customers would shop almost anywhere if the prices were lower. An amusing episode at the time of the opening of the second Wal-Mart store confirmed the wisdom of Walton’s new approach. [...]

  • Innovate, Experiment, Create Anarchy

  • As stated earlier, Walton founded Wal-Mart not out of some grand vision of reinventing the retailing world, but to avoid being run over by a new breed of competitor. Although Walton had never operated a "pure" discount store before founding Wal-Mart, he had learned many lessons about how the game was played, including the paradoxical [...]

  • A Pioneer of the Learning Culture

  • Sam Walton got into retailing by accident. Upon graduating from college, he started as a J. C. Penney management trainee at $75 per month. Later, he borrowed the money he needed to open his first store: a Ben Franklin 5-and-10 franchise in Newport, Arkansas. One of his competitors there was Sterling, a store that was [...]

  • What Would Sam Walton Do?

  • There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. —SAM WALTON Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from someone else. —SAM WALTON What Would Sam Walton Do? In the seat of the CEO: You are the founder [...]