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Abstract
Marketing a business is a challenging endeavor. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the Urban Outfitters case study. Difficulties with creating a trendy counterculture image are discussed. Why big box stores cannot sell merchandize identical to Urban Outfitters is explained. The paper explains the value of exclusivity and the relationship between shopping and entertainment.
Marketing a business is a challenging endeavor. In the atmosphere of fierce competition, uniqueness and exclusivity often become the main sources of competitive advantage. The case of Urban Outfitters suggests that uniqueness and differentiation can help businesses to overcome marketing difficulties and achieve sustained marketing success.
Big box stores can never sell merchandize identical to Urban Outfitters: store chains like Wal-Mart or Sears always seek chain supply efficiency, which predetermines their commercial success. As a result, they have to sacrifice exclusiveness for the sake of stable profits and can never satisfy the symbolic needs of customers for ego-identification and self-enhancement.
Why Wal-Mart and Sears cannot create an effective trendy counterculture image is not difficult to explain. First, standardization is an essential ingredient of Wal-Mart’s marketing strategies.
Standard in their assortment and store design, Wal-Mart, Sears, and similar companies always seek to provide their customers with cheap but quality products. However, counterculture image can never be cheap, nor is it compatible with the key values and visions of big supply chains. Second, supply chain efficiency and low profit margins through high sales volumes are the distinctive features of large supply chains’ operations.
The bulk of goods offered by Wal-Mart and Sears will never make customers unique. Any attempt to create a counterculture will reduce their supply chain efficiency and doom most of their business endeavors to failure. Neither Wal-Mart nor Sears can sacrifice their market position for the sake of entering a small counterculture niche. Wal-Mart and Sears win because they meet standard demands of common consumers, who do not seek differentiation but merely want to save their costs.
Big box stores can never sell merchandize identical to Urban Outfitters, because the latter relies on low sales volumes, emphasizes exclusivity and differentiation, and provides its staff with freedom of creativity and assortment choice.
Differentiation and large sales volumes are incompatible; again, Wal-Mart cannot sacrifice supply chain efficiency for the sake of acquiring an image of a countercultural provider of exclusive goods. Wal-Mart simply does not have enough financial or staff opportunities to ensure that its goods are always new and unique. Take a look at Urban Outfitters: “every Monday, Urban executives analyze and react to sales for the last week […] the system is flexible enough to change direction on a weekly basis” (Brown, 2004).
Every Monday, Urban executives reconsider their assortments and rotate their merchandize, to meet the needs of unique customers (Brown, 2004). Big box stores simply lack flexibility to make exclusivity their defining feature. Moreover, exclusivity does not fit in big box stores’ trade philosophy. “Exclusive big box stores” is an oxymoron rather than a reality. Wal-Mart and Urban Outfitters are at the two opposite ends of one trade continuum, and they will never become a single entity.
Why exclusivity is valuable? Several answers are possible. At once, exclusivity is associated with differentiation, and many customers want to be different from the gray mass of people. At a deeper level, exclusivity reinforces the sense of prestige in the mind of a customer (Groth & McDaniel, 1993).
It is through exclusivity that brands like Urban Outfitters can meet the symbolic needs of customers, who seek self-enhancement and ego-identification (Park, Jarowski & MacInnis, 1986). This is probably why Urban Outfitters target college students, who are still at the very beginning of their way to self-identification.
The significance of the relationship between consumption and symbolic needs cannot be overstated: brands like Urban Outfitters let their consumers associate themselves with the desired self-image (Park et al, 1986). These symbolic meanings have little to do with a particular product class but are tied to the entire brand, creating a generic image of prestige and wellbeing (Park et al, 1986).
Whether or not shopping is entertainment depends upon many factors. However, it is at least incorrect to say that in their shopping experiences all customers inevitably seek entertainment. In reality, different consumers pursue different shopping goals. In brief, consumers can be either product-oriented or experiential (Ibrahim & Wee, 2002).
The former are motivated by the need to purchase products (Ibrahim & Wee, 2002). The latter are guided by recreational and hedonic motives and experience a sense of pleasure inherent in the act of purchase (Ibrahim & Wee, 2002). The shopping-as-entertainment-philosophy may not be appropriate for all types of buyers but can become extremely valuable in developing separate shopper segments.
Marketing is not about providing customers with entertainment opportunities; rather, successful marketing requires knowledge of the motives drawing consumers to the store. Marketing campaigns are successful only when they meet the needs of consumer audiences. Entertainment can become a useful element of marketing a business, but only in situations when the new or existing brand targets hedonic customers and helps them meet their symbolic needs.
Conclusion
Marketing is successful to the extent that meets the needs of customers. Big box stores like Wal-Mart and Sears can never sell merchandize identical to Urban Outfitters, since they lack capacity to pursue uniqueness. Wal-Mart customers merely want to save their costs, and standardization is a direct prerequisite of supply chain efficiency in big box stores.
Exclusivity is valuable for customers who seek prestige and ego-identification. As a result, entertainment can become a useful element of marketing a business, but only in situations when the new or existing brand targets hedonic customers and helps them to meet their symbolic needs.
References
Brown, H. (2004). Urban cowboy.. Forbes Web.
Groth, J.C. & McDaniel, S.W. (1993). The exclusive value principle: The basis for prestige rating. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 10(1), 10-16.
Ibrahim, M.F. & Wee, N.C. (2002). The importance of entertainment in the shopping centre experience: Evidence from Singapore. Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management, 8(3), 239-254.
Park, C.W., Jaworski, B.J. & MacInnis, D.J. (1986). Strategic brand concept-image management. Journal of Marketing, vol.50, 135-145.
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