Marketing System for Woolworths: Community Engagement Programs

This report discusses the role of community engagement programs in the marketing system of Woolworths, the largest retailer in Australia and New Zealand. It provides an overview of the company, its community engagement programs, and the role of marketing in promoting the brand. The report also explores the system theory concept and provides recommendations for improvement.

Running head: MARKETING SYSTEM
Marketing system
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Organizational Background.......................................................................................................3
Overview....................................................................................................................................3
Woolworths Community Engagement Programs.......................................................................3
Role within a Marketing System and Key Opportunities..........................................................4
System Theory Concept and Link with the example of Woolworths........................................5
System........................................................................................................................................5
System Boundary.......................................................................................................................6
Recommendations......................................................................................................................7
References..................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Organizational Background
Woolworths Supermarket is an Australian supermarket store owned by Woolworths
Limited. The company was founded in the year 1924. The company gradually expanded
themselves in the following years and is now one of the two largest supermarket stores of
Australia. The company specializes in selling groceries and other household products and has
a total of more than 1000 stores across Australia. The annual revenue of the organization is
around 42.132 billion and the management of the company employs around 111,000 people
which make them one of the largest employers in Australia.
Overview
A particular specialization takes root in the human communities, the economies of
scale and the diversity of scale. The following type of system has generally a large number of
different forms which included the likes of the pre historic barter system or the likes of the
present day complex system of seller and buyer, supply chains and delivery of goods and
services (Anda and Temmen 2014). The following report is based on one of the modern types
of marketing system named community development or community engagement programs
that means the process or the ways adapted by the organization to engage with the
community where they operate their business. The report has taken the example of
Woolworths in Australia which is the largest retailer or the supermarket stores in Australia
and New Zealand.

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Woolworths Community Engagement Programs
Community Engagement is a very critical and complex activity as there are a number
of different elements involved in it. The involvement of the large number of different types of
the elements makes it almost impossible to describe the development of the organization in a
clear and transparent manner. Though the following is a very complex field, the method can
be used to highlight the different types of the components to work (French and Russell-
Bennett 2015). The presence of the different kind of stores of Woolworths across the cities,
regions and a number of different remote areas of Australia makes it a must to have different
kind of community engagement programs to satisfy the demands of the customers by keeping
in a constant touch with them. The company claims itself to be the fabric of the society. The
management of the company highlights that they use the resources and skills to partner with
the community to improve the health and the well being of the customers of the company and
also helps in the creation of new job opportunities for the young job aspirants in Australia s
well as New Zealand (woolworthsgroup.com 2018). The Woolworths has made itself
accountable to help out the people who are in need and also engage in relief activities during
natural disasters and post-disaster recovery. The company also has a set of policies that helps
the customers to donate funds to charitable institutions.
Role within a Marketing System and Key Opportunities
The role of the marketing department of Woolworths is of great importance in
promoting the mission and achieving the goals of the organization. The marketing department
of Woolworths reaches out to the people of the organization and also to the different
prospective customers, sellers and the community as a whole. The community engagement
program of the following company by the help of the marketing department helps the

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organization to be successful in the market. The main roles of the organization within the
marketing system are;
a. Defining and managing the brand name of the organization
b. Conducting campaigns to promote the brand
c. Producing both internal and external communications
d. Conducting customer and market research
Some of the major opportunities for Woolworths are as follows;
a. To expand their business limits and ensure the presence of the stores at places other
than Australia
b. To expand their line of business and deal in other different businesses
c. To search for acquisitions in developing economies which are the best markets for
retail stores
System Theory Concept and Link with the example of Woolworths
Some of the most basic concepts of system theory are as follows;
System
A system is defined as the set or group of elements or components that stands in
interaction and has one or more than one things in common with each other. The following
includes the grouping with a number of people or the engagement with a number of people in
the organization. It can also involve the engagement with the customers of the organization.
The following concept or the component has a clear link with the selected example of the
community development project of Woolworths where there can be smaller systems (sub-
systems) within the other kind of large systems (Gupta et al. 2015). The small sub systems in

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this particular case are the community engagement programs in the different areas where
Woolworths store is located. On the other hand the inclusion of a large number of systems
makes up a larger community development program (Tietzen Mackay and Bates 2015). The
below shown diagram will imply the system, sub-system and the boundaries of the following
engagement programs of the company.
Figure 1: System, Sub-System and boundaries
(Source: As Created by the Author)
System Boundary
Each and every marketing system to engage with the community and help in the
development is defined by a list of boundaries. The boundary is generally thought to be an
imaginary line that determines the concepts or the elements that is inside and the concepts
that are outside the system. In the following case the boundary is defined by three different
ways (Hollebeek Juric and Tang 2017). The first one being the boundary which consists of
BOUNDARIES
COMBINATION OF SMALL STORES
Small
store

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the different small sub-systems of the individual stores, the second one being the group of
sub-systems within a large boundary and lastly the third one is the group of the total sub
systems or the group of these total elements within the highest possible boundary (Varma et
al. 2016).
In this particular example the organization makes up a number of different things in
the group which includes the likes of the different small stores and their boundaries
comprises of engagement activities within that particular region and the large boundaries are
supposedly the group of stores in New South Wales or Queensland. Lastly the largest
possible boundary is the boundary of Australia or New Zealand.
Recommendations
The Community engagement acts of Woolworths can be improved by applying a
number of steps accordingly,
 Attracting more sponsors for community engagement programs. The sponsors may be
invited to showcase the program or the events which may increase the chances of
investment
 Engagement of government in the following programs. The management of the
company must present a detailed and well planned presentation to the Government to
convince the Government and receive proper funding for the programs
 promoting business related conferences and arranging different types of new and
innovative exhibition sponsorships

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References
Anda, M. and Temmen, J., 2014. Smart metering for residential energy efficiency: The use of
community based social marketing for behavioural change and smart grid
introduction. Renewable energy, 67, pp.119-127.
French, J. and Russell-Bennett, R., 2015. A hierarchical model of social marketing. Journal
of Social Marketing, 5(2), pp.139-159.
Gupta, A., Calfas, K.J., Marshall, S.J., Robinson, T.N., Rock, C.L., Huang, J.S., Epstein-
Corbin, M., Servetas, C., Donohue, M.C., Norman, G.J. and Raab, F., 2015. Clinical trial
management of participant recruitment, enrollment, engagement, and retention in the
SMART study using a Marketing and Information Technology (MARKIT)
model. Contemporary clinical trials, 42, pp.185-195.
Hollebeek, L.D., Juric, B. and Tang, W., 2017. Virtual Brand community engagement
practices: a refined typology and model. Journal of Services Marketing, 31(3), pp.204-217.
Tietzen, T., Mackay, R.J. and Bates, M.A., Edatanetworks Inc, 2015. Program, system and
method for linking community programs and merchants in a marketing program. U.S. Patent
9,111,295.
Varma, D.S., Hart, M., McIntyre, D.S., Kwiatkowski, E. and Cottler, L.B., 2016. A Research
Protocol to Test the Effectiveness of Text Messaging and Reminder Calls to Increase Service
Use Referrals in a Community Engagement Program. JMIR research protocols, 5(2).
Woolworthsgroup.com.au. (2018). Supporting our community - Woolworths Group. [online]
Available at: https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/community-and-responsibility/
group-responsibility/environment/supporting-our-community [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].