Impact of Social Media on Sainsbury’s in the Public Retail Sector

Unit 4: Public Services
in Contemporary
Society

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................3
Major Contemporary Challenges Faced by Sainsbury’s.............................................................3
Corporate Governance Structure of Sainsbury’s.........................................................................5
Sources of Funding for Sainsbury’s............................................................................................6
Small scale research over impact of social media to the current pandemic................................8
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

INTRODUCTION
Social medias are engaging and interactive digital technological solutions through which
the average users and business organisations can create and share content with other citizens and
participate in digital social networking with each other. Social media platforms facilitate the
creation and sharing of ideas, information, career interests and allow for its users to express
themselves to others via virtual networks and communities. Social media has had an enormous
impact on the overall operations of the public retail sector (Mattsson and Andersson, 2019). This
report analyses the impact on social media on Sainsbury’s, which is a public retail business
organisation that was created in 1869 and went public in 1973. Sainsbury’s operates from its
current headquarters in London, UK and has grown to become the second largest supermarket
chain in all of UK, possessing a total market share of over 16%. Sainsbury’s operates over 1428
distinct establishments in UK.
MAIN BODY
Major Contemporary Challenges Faced by Sainsbury’s
Sainsbury’s faces various major and minor contemporary challenges during its operations
within the public retail sector of UK. The most significant and major contemporary challenges
that are faced by Sainsbury’s in the public retail sector of UK are as follows:
Intense competition: Sainsbury’s faces intense competition from the other major business
organisations that also operate in the retail sector of UK such as Tesco, Aldi etc. This intense
competition is one of the most major issue and challenge to the current operational success of
Sainsbury’s, as most of its competitors also conduct their operations towards similar
organisational goals of Sainsbury’s such as increasing their overall productivity and profitability
by increasing their overall customer base and market share metrics. As Sainsbury’s is a public
business organisation, it becomes a significant challenge for it to outcompete privately owned
and operated competitors within the retail sector as these possess vastly greater financial
resources to invest into improving their operations. Social media has also contributed
significantly towards increasing the challenge that Sainsbury’s faces from its competitors. On

social media platforms, many of Sainsbury’s competitors promote and advertise their newly
innovated goods and products to the public and the various discounts and sales that such
businesses offer to its consumers (de los Reyes Jr, 2019). Sainsbury’s being a public business
organisation finds it hard to outcompete its competitors on innovation and discounted sales and
stands to lose customers to their competitors owing to their social media marketing.
Training and development: Another major challenge that Sainsbury’s faces relates to them
making use of social media platforms in order to effectively provide optimum levels of customer
services to their customers within the retail markets. Social media is such a great and productive
place where Sainsbury’s can provide effective customer service to their customers, but this
requires Sainsbury’s to effectively train and develop their own customer representative
employees in order for them to be able to provide optimum levels of customer service to
Sainsbury’s customers up to the standards that are expected of the business organisation. This is
a major challenge as training and developing the customer servicing skills of their employees
consumes various important resources of Sainsbury’s such as financial resources, human
resources, training equipment etc. in addition to the time resources that Sainsbury’s is required to
invest into the training and development of their customer representative employees.
Negative Social Media Interactions: As social media has become an important and essential
platform where the marketing and customer service operations of Sainsbury’s can take place,
another major challenge that Sainsbury’s faces pertains to all their interactions on the social
media, between the business organisation and its customers are required to exclusively be
positive in nature. When the social media interactions between Sainsbury’s business organisation
and their customers are negative in nature, then these have the tendency to attract negative
headlines for the business organisations in the news papers, place the business organisation in a
negative lime light in the public’s eye and also have a significantly bad impact on the brand
value and reputation of Sainsbury’s in the retail industry (Ganapati and Reddick, 2018). This is a
major challenge as many of the times the customers themselves showcase the business
organisation in a negative manner which is a major issue for the business organisation.
Thefts: Another major issue for Sainsbury’s relates to the thefts and shoplifting that occurs in its
retail establishments. This is also another major challenge for Sainsbury’s as it looses productive
goods and products to customers who choose to steal or lift the products off of Sainsbury’s