Exclusive Marketing Strategy of Walmart India: Analysis

About Walmart India – 

Source – PNGitem

Walmart is a notably well-known multinational retailing corporation incorporated in the United States of America that operates grocery stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets etc. It was designed by Sam Walton in 1962 in Arkansas, a state in the USA, and was incorporated in 1969. Walmart has become a global uproar with an estimated 11,500 retail locations in 28 countries and 11 e-commerce sites. Walmart was a physical retail outlet, and later on, it moved to e-retail in the year 2000.

Walmart India private limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of Walmart stores incorporation that owns and employs 28 B2B present-day wholesale stores under the brand name ” best price “. It was founded by Krish Iyer in 2009.

It is dedicated to a future where marketing in India is a blend of shopping experiences that serve Indian customers, suppliers, producers and retailers.

The brand maintains its stability by emphasising customer attention, cost controls and efficiencies in the distribution networks. It is best known for its high-quality products at cheap prices. 

Quick Stats –

Marketing Strategy of Walmart India –

Now, we will be proceeding to the main segment of this case study. We would look at the STP Analysis, to start the marketing strategy of Walmart India.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

The segmentation strategy helps in having a clear grip on different sub-segments of customers and their dynamic needs. Walmart India uses psychographic and demographic segmentation strategies. This helps it to understand the mindset of the customer and have a clear understanding that the customer desires everyday goods at reasonable prices.

An undifferentiated targeting strategy is used by the brand to seize the market. The price of products plays the main role as the differentiator for Walmart India. A low-pricing strategy is used for a large number of people.

Positioning strategy plays a crucial role in every industry in its success. Walmart India has positioned itself as a company presenting products at the lowest price to individuals. It uses the pricing advantage to be reliable in its business model.

Marketing Campaigns

Walmart India does not launch such marketing campaigns to promote the brand in India. 

Marketing campaigns are planned, organised efforts that support a company’s goal or objective, such as marketing a good or service or the brand as a whole using various media, including print, radio, television, and online platforms. To get the most effective results, marketing campaigns are carefully designed and the activities are varied.

Before beginning a marketing campaign, marketers must assemble information on the market. They should know everything relating to their product, their customers, and the competitors within their niche. The ambition is to ensure that the campaign reaches the maximum number of people in the target society.

Social Media Marketing

Walmart India has sunk money into social media marketing to upgrade their influence and engage their followers. While Facebook is the prime social media marketing channel of Walmart, the brand is also making use of other social media networking sites like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn for promoting its brand and managing customer relations. 

The number of followers according to different social media platforms are as follows:-

• Facebook – 34.27 million
• Instagram – 10k
• LinkedIn – 8L
• Twitter – 12k
• Pinterest – 33000+

The posts on various social media platforms carry mostly promotional and informational content along with other posts related to discount offers on the products available.

This helps the brand with engaging customers and run seasonal promotions to execute sales. Moreover, funding in social media marketing has also helped Walmart India improve customer loyalty and grow their general influence in both online and offline domains.

SEO Strategies

Source – UberSuggest

According to SEO ranking, the number of keywords – below 500 is bad, above 1000 is good, and above 10,000 is amazing. From this, we can conclude that the search volume of Walmart India is 438K+ which is remarkable. Another factor to take into consideration in an SEO Strategy is monthly visits and Walmart India has grand monthly visits of around 9M. 

This indicates that the SEO strategy of Walmart India is unbeatable.

Influencer Marketing

Walmart presently works with influencers which they have attained through collaboration with various platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest etc for their marketing purposes. These influencers help Walmart India with promoting its groceries and apparel as well as its Walmart+ loyalty program. Influencers normally have many followers on Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest and they advocate products to the public by posting affiliate links. Influencers promote the products of Walmart India which helps in gaining fame and accordingly sales increases via their fan following.

E-Commerce Strategies

Walmart spotlights the consumers’ craving for value and delivers what the customer wants. They focus on stocking up on products from different categories varying from groceries to apparel to makeup and so on. This creates value for the customers as they can find all the products they need in one shop under one roof. They have an e-commerce portal which makes it possible for customers to do online shopping from its website itself.

Mobile Apps

They have online shopping apps such as Flipkart and Myntra to fuel the needs of their customers where they get customisable options in terms of order placement, delivery and payment. They have a wide range of products accompanied by a fair price point which leads them to have a huge customer base.

Content Marketing Strategies

Walmart India deeply concentrates on promoting its brand and is also very active on social media. Walmart India advances its brand everywhere. It has content marketing strategies of running ads on different platforms such as TV, social media, billboards, PR, newspapers (The Times of India), magazines and many more. 

The content is related to some discounts, deals or special offers on products. This applies to both the physical mode and the online mode of shopping.

This ends with the insightful marketing strategy of Walmart India.

What’s Unique in the Marketing Strategy of Walmart India?

In the marketing strategy of Walmart India, we came to know that Walmart India has strongly been able to play to its strengths and also attain love and support from all places in the World. The main reason for the success of Walmart India is genuine branding. They wanted to become the chiefs of the best prices, so they sketched all their marketing strategies with low cost and improved sales.

The main problem for Walmart India was that Walmart always sold its products directly to customers. However, in India, accepting this strategy was not workable due to certain foreign investment guidelines and blockades. India permits only 51% of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail stores. Another dilemma it faced was that India had an impoverished physical infrastructure. The poor quality of roads and transportation accompanied by the unwillingness to adopt modern technology were core barriers to be overcome.

Anyhow, to survive and exist in India’s complicated business environment, Walmart transferred from selling to customers directly by launching cash-and-carry (CC) format stores to selling to small wholesale buyers, with 100% FDI allowed in cash-and-carry wholesale enterprises. 

India also started developing its physical infrastructure for many important reasons which became a clear path for Walmart to retail in the Indian Market. As India had to establish relations with many countries worldwide, the adoption of modern technology became a mandate. As most of the activities or transactions in the world are running mostly in online mode, Walmart India shifted its focal point towards becoming a technology-centric company. This helped Walmart India to grow more prosperous in terms of sales and attract potential customers as people could not only find all the items they were looking for at Walmart, but they could also buy them at discounted prices.

Through digital marketing, the scope of immediately fixing any mishaps is there. If you want to learn Digital Marketing IIDE offers some amazing programmes to choose from one is Online Digital Marketing Courses and another is MBA in Digital Marketing Course. You can choose anyone as per your needs.

So we are at the end of the reading. Please share your thoughts and queries in the comments section given below. If you love such thorough analysis of companies just like we discussed the marketing strategy of Walmart India, then check out our IIDE Knowledge portal for more delightful case studies. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog on the marketing strategy of Walmart India.