Shelf Label Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

INTRODUCTION

Wal-Mart, founded in 1962, opened its first discount store in Rogers. Wal-Mart serves more than 200 million customers and members at more than 8,000 retail stores. Moreover, Wal-Mart comprises 2.1 million employees worldwide. According to the most admired companies’ survey, Wal-Mart is ranked at the top of the retail stores. The basic purpose of Wal-Mart is to deliver quality products and services to its customers and members and provide them a better life. Furthermore, Walmart.com became one of the most visited websites in the retail industry.

Approximately 40% of products sold in Walmart belongs to private label brand and produced through contracts with manufacturers. Wal-Mart started offering private labels in 1991 with the inauguration of Sam’s choice. Sam’s choice is the Cott Beverage brand, and the third largest product in the United States. Walmart’s purpose is to offer good customer services and to develop a competitive advantage (KL Ailawadi, 2004).

Walmart’s business model includes targeting products that are comparable at the low price. The company’s practices and procedures for the retailers are to set the standard price for the items to be seen on stores shelves. The main objective is to sell the product and drop down the product that is not being sold. Therefore, they want the product that covers the shelf space and bring profits to the company. Moreover, many retail stores established electronic shelf labels to change their pricing strategies and to gain competitive advantages. The motive of Walmart is to target everyday customers, offer the wide range of items, with the unique designer label products. Wal-Mart is concern about the shelf label item description and continuously improving the label items, in order to make it readable for people (OP Gupta, 1996)

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Nowadays, numerous problems arose regarding shelf label items description and made it difficult for the human to read them. Some of the items are written manually and some are computerized. Moreover, the major concern factors include the font size of the staple items and some items do not contain an item's description, especially in the local retail stores. Many people have eyesight problems and, therefore, the smallest font size of items is not human readable.

Furthermore, the issues faced by the customers are the change in prices of different brands in different stores. Many countries consider it illegal to write down the labels of items with hands because sometimes it does not contain the right information. The wrong information leads the company to face many problems and customers’ dissatisfaction. Moreover, the misleading price tags and manual written information decrease the brand loyalty of the company and the retail stores.

The main problem that the company needs to analyze the issues is regarding the use of font size for expiry dates because sometimes it is not readable and dangerous for the human health. Due to the change in variations within the stores of the shelf labels there has been an increase in the number of problems of shelf labels. The problem identification of the shelf label should be eliminated and increase long-term possibilities to improve the customer service.

Therefore, it is highly important for the brands and retail stores to overcome these issues and increase the customers’ satisfaction. Moreover, in-depth analyses of competitors are required to come up with possible solutions and recommendations.

BRAND SHELF LABELS

Different brands follow different shelf label item description. Some of the brands have a problem with the unit price on the shelf labels and misleading label that decrease the brand image of the company. Moreover, the pattern used by the brands has a high error rate along with reluctance and resistance.

Some brands train the suppliers and third-party merchandise to solve the issue of shelf label items. The shelf label problem also arises because of untrained staff, traditional computer system and use of the manual entry system. Furthermore, in local retail stores, labels are written with hands and incomplete description of the items.

COMPETITORS ANALYSIS

WAL-MART

Walmart, one of the leading companies, faced many hurdles to maintain shelf label item's description, due to code errors and a small glitch in the system. However, Walmart started making some changes to solve the problems, and some mislabels identified by the Walmart were taken down. The basic purpose of Walmart is to develop a better quality control system and eliminate coding errors....................

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