Case Background
Carrefour is the world largest foodstuff retail chains in volume sales; the hypermarkets have their head office at Levallois-Perret, France; Lars Olofsson and Amaury de Sèze opened the company’s first branch on June 3, 1957 at Annecy, France.
To remain competitive in the fast changing and competitive retail industry, the company ensures it has established its outlets in strategic locations and has an appealing internal design/layout to facilitate fast shopping and create good impression to its customers (Carrefour Official Website). This paper discusses Carrefour’s location and design strategies.
Location
To ensure that the company gets to its target customers effectively, it is located in places of high population; areas that they expect to have a large customer base. The company offers fresh products thus, they need to be close to the consumers as possible. The locations include in shopping malls, shopping centres, airports and in emerging towns, depending with the location, the products that the company stocks varies. For example, the company sells fast foods at airports in their kitchen section.
In every chain, the company ensures that there is ample parking that customers can use when shopping, the locations are also accessible when using public means and when having a personal means of transport.
The location of the hypermarkets offers a pleasant experience to customers, they feel their needs are catered for within any chain; this helps in creating customer loyalty and confidence with a hypermarket (Carrefour Official Website)
Internal design and the effect on customers
The company offers more than 3,000 non-food items; some of these items include cosmetics, furniture, electronics, office equipments, and kitchenwares. To ensure that customers are able to get products in a shopping mall, the company has created a pleasant and easy to follow internal design; it has divided the malls into sections offering similar goods and they are well label.
For example, vegetables are found in the same section, electronic and kitchenware in the same section. When a customer is not able to trace a commodity, the staffs are willing and ready to assist, they are well versed with the structure and the way the chain of supermarkets have been arranged, this assists in easy guidance inside the chain.
It is a policy that all companies operating under the name of Carrefour has the same arrangement strategy; this strategy assists international consumers be able to buy from any chain of the company.
To effectively manage the multibillion stores, the company manages an orchestrate team. For an effective operation, Carrefour requires an optimal combination of physical and human resources. Well-trained and experienced work force is the greatest asset that an organization can have; it is through human resources that an organisation exists.
The company ensures that there is good customer service offered by the staffs at all level; staffs are expected to have high morale and good mastery of the chain of markets and how they are planned. In case a customer feels that he/she want shopping guide, the company is willing to offer some. There are good shopping trolleys that have engine in case someone needs (Fred 12-56).
Conclusion
The success of Carrefour hypermarkets can be attributed to its strategic locations and quality customer service. The company has appearing internal designs where products of the same categories are placed in the same segment to facilitate fast shopping.
Works Cited
Carrefour Official Website. Carrefour UAE. 2011. Web.
Fred, David. Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2008. Print.