家乐福营销策略--英文版

Introduction

Seeing from the trends of development in retail industry, hypermarket with its advantages like open-shelf sales, convenient and cheap and one-stop shopping has become the main type in retail industry. After the hypermarket appeared in the mid-20th century, it has made contributions to the extension of international market, the prosperity of global trade and the development of world’s economy. The hypermarket is re-development and re-creation of the supermarket. Compared with the supermarket, hypermarket not only operates larger business areas, but also has more kinds of goods. It uses optional way to sell the daily essentials so that it can meet the customers’ demand for one-stop shopping. Wider and more comfortable shopping environment and complete types of goods makes the hypermarket enjoy the customers’favor. The hypermarket has become one of the fastest growing formats as well as the most dynamic form of retail organization in retail industry.

Carrefour is a French international hypermarket chain which is headquartered in Levallois-Perret, France. Carrefour is the largest hypermarket chain in the world in terms of size, and the second largest retail group in terms of revenue and profit after Wal-Mart. As the world’s second largest retailer, Carrefour operates more than 10,300 stores in France and 11,000 stores covered 30 countries and areas around the world. In 2005, the Carrefour ranked the 22nd in The Wealth 500 strong business enterprises. The Carrefour leads the market mainly in three kinds of managing modes as Hypermarket, Supermarket and Hard Discount Store. In China, the main operation type of Carrefour is hypermarket with the discount stores named “Dia” as supplement.

This study aims at the research of Carrefour and elaborates the creation, characteristic and development process of Carrefour and makes use of the basic theories of marketing to analyze the existing marketing strategy of Carrefour in detail. In order to face the challenges and chances, the SWOT analysis is made to nail down the advantages and disadvantages of Carrefour. STP analysis is aimed to ensure the target market and market fixed position of Carrefour, thereby get the marketing strategy of the hypermarket. Finally, this thesis put forward several suggestions to Carrefour for its further development, hoping the advice could be useful to the development of the native company and the race retail trade of our country could have sustained, rapid and sound development.

1. Background Information

With the development of economy in China, the retail market has entered into a new period with fiercer competition than ever. In such a situation, however, Carrefour achieves great success in the Chinese retail market.

1.1 Brief Introduction of Carrefour

Carrefour Group, founded in 1959, is the pioneer of hypermarket format. In 1963, Carrefour opened its first store in France. Carrefour merged with Promodes SA in 2000 and then became Europe’s leading and the world’s second-largest retailer. Carrefour mainly operates three business types, they are: hypermarkets, supermarkets and discount stores. In addition, Carrefour has also developed a number of convenient stores and membership-based discount stores in some countries. The company’s founders created the concept of the hypermarket, an expanded supermarket offering a wide variety of merchandise, including groceries, electronics, clothing, and automotive supplies, that allowed consumers to accomplish most of their shopping at one store. The rapid success of Hypermarkets has revolutionized the retail industry in France and worldwide. In 2004, the whole Carrefour Group sold 72.668 billion Euros after tax, employed over 43 million people, and ranked second only to the Wal-Mart in the world retail industry.

Carrefour’s business philosophy is based on low prices, excellent customer service and comfortable shopping environment to provide the vast number of customers for the necessary daily consumer goods. Carrefour implements self-service shopping, free parking, low prices and high efficiency shopping and other series of services. And, it’s “Happy shopping Carrefour” and “one-stop shopping” and other advanced management concepts have got the favor from the majority of consumers.

Therefore, the foundation of Carrefour’s development and services is to better meet the shopping needs of consumers. Carrefour shares its advanced business equipments and brand-new retail business concepts with others in the world to actively improve the quality of people's consumption and living standards, stimulate consumers’demands, promote and facilitate the local economic development.

1.2 The Development of Carrefour in China

In 1995, Carrefour successfully opened its first hypermarket in China: Beijing ChuangYi store. Due to the store’s new business philosophy, it was successfully accepted by the Chinese consumers. During the past 10 years, Carrefour had maintained the leading position among the foreign retail enterprises in China and led the development of Chinese modern retail industry. At present, Carrefour has opened more than 60 stores with more than 30,000 employees in 26 cities of China. In addition, Carrefour set up its global sourcing headquarters