Asda Marketing: Ethical Considerations and Strategic Analysis Report

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Asda's marketing communication strategies, ethical considerations, and overall business practices. The report begins with an examination of ethical behavior within organizations, focusing on how Asda can improve its ethical climate across various departments, including finance, human resources, and overall business conduct. An executive summary highlights key aspects of Asda's marketing communication, including advertising, direct marketing, and the role of the internet and social media. The report then delves into a detailed company overview, emphasizing Asda's position in the UK grocery market, its expansion plans, and its core values. A critical component of the report is a current marketing situation analysis, which considers political, economic, social, and technological factors affecting Asda. Based on this analysis, the report outlines marketing objectives, strategies, and segmentation approaches, particularly focusing on the 'Love Ireland, Like Asda' campaign. The report also covers targeting and positioning strategies, along with specific tactics and actions to achieve marketing goals, including budget considerations and control mechanisms. Finally, the report concludes with a summary of findings and recommendations for Asda to enhance its market position and address ethical concerns.

Marketing Communication

Table of Contents
Part A...............................................................................................................................................3
Ways to maintain the ethical behavior in an organization...........................................................3
Executive summary.....................................................................................................................3
Company Overview.....................................................................................................................4
Current Marketing situation analysis:..........................................................................................4
Marketing Objective....................................................................................................................5
Strategy and Segmentation..........................................................................................................5
Tactics and Action.......................................................................................................................6
Budget..........................................................................................................................................7
Control.........................................................................................................................................7
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................7
Part B...............................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................10

Part A
Ways to maintain the ethical behavior in an organization.
In simple terms, Business ethics is the application of moral and ethical norms in carrying
out the business. Every organization needs to design moral principle, standards and code of
conduct that employees and the workforce are expected to follow while dealing with clients and
customers (Castronovo and Huang, 2012). But many companies do not practically follow this
code of ethics and the researcher has named some of the organization which is least ethical as
Asda, Lidl, Morrison. Researcher has chosen Asda to understand the ethical climate of this
company and recommend the ways to improve it. The ethics has a wide scope, it is involved in
each and every segment. In law related aspect, the firm needs to follow law in true letter and
spirit. The motivations for being compliant is do right things out of fear of being caught rather
than desire to abide by law. This helps the company to go beyond the expectation. The company
should also its ethical practices in Finance as they should not adopt window dressing and
misleading financial analysis in accounting. The Asda should not indulge in Related party
transaction which is not at arm’s length prices. The top management of Asda mostly indulge in
Bribery and over billing of expenses that should be prohibited in an organization to create
positive ethical environment.
The ethics also covers Human Resource in its ambit. The Human Resource department
should ensure that they should not indulge in discriminatory practices and give each employee
equal and fair treatment (Parente and Strausbaugh-Hutchinson 2014). In order to manage all
these business code of conduct. Firm needs to conduct training session where they will educate
and teach each person working for Asda regarding the ethical practices adopted by company and
consequences of violation of these code of conduct. They will design the ethics committee that
will make ensure that no person in the firm is working against the firm’s code of practice and
review the policies, mission, goals and objective and then the data analysis is verified by an
independent party. The final report is then submitted to top management executives.
Executive summary
The integral area of marketing communication is advertising, direct marketing, sales and
promotions whose aim is to long lasting impact of company on its customer. In the technological
world, Internet plays crucial role in marketing communication tools as it helps to create
alternative methods of interaction such as online marketing, social media, database marketing . It

helps to create strong bond between the marketers and other stakeholders. The present report
have undertaken Asda, which is a british supermarket retailer which is part of the walmart group
in UK (Luxton, Reid and Mavondo, 2015). The present report discusses about the analysis of the
current marketing situation and design the strategy to attain marketing objective. It evaluates
different terms of marketing as Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. This deport analyse the
determination of budget and establish monitoring and controlling system.
Company Overview
Asda holds renowned position in the UK grocery retailing market. The firm occupies the
leading position in the Clothing market with the George clothing brand. Asda is looking forward
to expand its business in the General Merchandise sector (Thorson and Moore, 2013). The
organization have large number of stores that makes the firm crucial part of communities of UK.
Sam Walton. Founder of Wal-Mart established the “the basic beliefs” as his company’s credo
that gives that reason to exist and develops the spirit of motivation among the employees. They
are Respect for the Individual, Service to our customers, Strive for excellence. It forms the part
of designing code of conduct for creating positive ethics climate. The firm needs to follow this
principles to create strong relationship with stakeholders.
Current Marketing situation analysis:
The marketing department of Asda needs to conduct current market situational analysis
before designing marketing objectives and strategies for making it a successful plan. The current
marketing situation analysis of Asda is as given below:
 Political factors: The marketing department needs to consider the trading and taxation
policies imposed by government. If the legislature have announced the increase in taxes
then the purchasing power of the customer then the firm needs to cut its marketing cost.
Nowadays Government is concerned about the health issues of the population (Blakeman,
2014). It has created political pressure and has result in the creation of new legislation
such as Alcohol Pricing reforms and Leveson investigation for supermarkets. These
factors directly and indirectly affects the job supplies, environment diversity and
planning. Thus, in order to survive in this competitive market, the firm needs to fulfil the
standards of a fairer, healthier, ethical and sustainable business practices.
 Economic factors: From the recent study, It has been found that since 2010, the big
discounters as Waitros, Aldi, Lidl have occupied 3.5% market share. In the end of

last year, the UK is facing recession that affects the shopping behavior of people and
ultimately resulted in the loss of the supermarkets (Pavlou and Stewart, 2015). So Asda
needs to meet the demand of people by designing their own brand products at low prices
with maintaining the standard of quality service.
 Social factors: The firm needs to consider the living styles, culture, tradition of the
society in which Asda provide its goods and services. The organization can take
advantage of this factor that helps them to create competitive advantage in the market
(Gambetti and Schultz, 2015). The marketing department can make use of their living
behavior to design their marketing strategies and policies.
 Technological factors: now days, people don’t have time to move out of their premises
for shopping purpose, so it give rise to the concept of online sales that is click and collect
deliveries. The firm needs to keep themselves updated with technology that reduces its
cost along with the increase in its productivity (Chen and Xie, 2008.).
The marketing department of Asda needs to consider the above perspective to make
informed marketing decision.
Marketing Objective
On analyzing the internal and external business environment, the marketing management
needs to design objective for its organization that would act as the guiding factor for the
employees. Thus, the marketing department of Asda is willing to provide high quality product at
guaranteed prices to its regular customers (Lane Keller, 2001). They want to expand its general
merchandise section and along with grocery and clothing section, they are willing to hold
command in other products. It wants to enhance its customer base to Irish customers and create
long lasting relationship with the stakeholders. They are planning to support and assist those
community that lead the Irish customers to purchase products (Pickton and Broderick, 2001).
Strategy and Segmentation
In order to attain above objective, The marketing department of Asda needs to design
strategy and select the market segment that they want to give priority. The management can
launch a marketing campaign of “Love Ireland, Like Asda” Campaign. In this Campaign, they
have targeted the public on the basis of geographical basis that is Ireland. This campaign was
carried out through TV, press, distributed the brochures that gives details about the relationship
with the company, the Irish producers and the suppliers (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). They want

to infuse ethical principles in their marketing decision. It has been found that Asda is considered
as the least ethical organization that is negatively affecting its brand image and goodwill. So the
firm will ensure that the advertisement shall not consist of misleading information. The pricing
policy of the product should not bluff the mind of people (Balmer and Greyser, 2006).
 Targeting: The firm has targeted Irish people in which they will identify the needs and
demands of those people and identify the niche in the market. They will find the
problems faced by them in shopping in supermarket and should try to overcome that
weakness (Melewar and Saunders. 2000).
 Positioning: The Asda needs to hold unique position in the mind of people as compared
to its competitor. The firm will perform the marketing and promotional activities in a
manner that helps them to create unique brand image in the market (Kitchen and
Burgmann, 2010). The Asda have targeted Irish people and will design the marketing
plan accordingly.
Tactics and Action
The marketing department of Asda will put the plan into action. They will design such
tactics and action that will create long lasting image among the society. The firm can market its
product by taking feedback from society regarding their product and will design the product and
services accordingly (Podnar and Balmer, 2013). The marketing department of Asda will identify
the tool through which it can reach wide range of people. The organization have found out that
most of the people makes use of internet to get information about the product and spare most of
the time in surfing internet, So will design attractive marketing matter that discloses true and fair
information about the product served by the supermarket and its services (Castronovo and
Huang, 2012).
They can enter into agreement with search engines that will show their advertisement
and their firm’s name appears on the top position in the list of advertisement. They can make use
of television to reach public who don’t access internet on daily basis and through audio visual
means they can understand their objective in the better manner. They will also publish this
advertisements in sites such as you tube so as to spread awareness about the product in the
market (What is Personal Networking,. 2012). The Asda can directly try to contact with the
customers by approaching them through mails or face to face when the customers at their store.
They can take feedback from the customers by drawing questionnaire and dropping those

questionnaire in their mail ids and request them to fill and avail discount offers to attract
customers. The Asda can conduct road shows to promote their product and services and increase
their sales.
Budget
The firm needs to determine the budget so as to allocate and determine the cost of its
product and services. It plays integral part as it directly affects the pricing of the product so the
firm must ensure that they can attain its marketing objective with minimum cost and following
the ethical practices (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). The firm will estimate the expense that will
have on the marketing of the product and services and then determine the budget. Mostly the
marketing channels such as television and newspaper are found to be costly and on the other
hand the internet publicity will not involve much cost.
Control:
The firm will assign the responsibility of monitoring function to some selected group of
people in marketing department. The role of this group of people comprise the controlling
function in which they will make ensure that the plan is implemented as decided by the
management (Thorson and Moore, 2013). They will consistently monitor the performance of the
employees so as to determine the deviation and take corrective measures immediately. The firm
will ensure that the plan is going in the right direction. This helps the firm to identify the
loopholes and make sure that they don’t repeat in future.
Conclusion
In nutshell, it can be said that in order to survive longer in the market, the firms needs to
counterbalance the economic, social and governance perspective. The Asda is considered as the
least ethical firm that is directly affecting the reputation of the firm. The Asda is the renowned
supermarket in the industry (Balmer and Greyser, 2006). The firm wants to enhance its customer
base to Irish people and increase its sale. The firm wants to segment the market on the basis of
geographical basis that is they have targeted Irish people. They are willing to launch marketing
campaign in which they will distribute brochures addressing needs and expectation of Irish
people. The firm will design marketing objective and design the marketing strategy accordingly.
The marketing department is willing to occupy unique position in the industry. The firm should
practice ethical practices in each and every functions of department. This helps the firm to create
brand image and unique position in the market.

Part B
A corporate code of conduct is a document comprises of
 Core values
 Moral principles
 It reflects commitments of the company to make sure ethical
behavior on the part of its members.
 It lays down do’s’ and don’ts’.
Ethics Program me
Asda should have an effective ethics program to make sure that
workforce should understand firm’s values and follow the policies and
code of conduct that builds ethical environment.
There are 2 types of ethics programme:
 Compliance Orientation program: it creates order that requires
that employees comply with and commit to the required conduct.
The oxford dictionary
states ethics as “ the
moral principle that
governs a person
behavior or how an
activity is conducted”.
Corporate code
of ethics comprises of six
core values or principles
as:
 Trustworthiness Respect Responsibility Fairness Caring Citizenship
It helps its members to
promote high standard
of ethics and practice.
It makes them aware of
ethical dilemmas and
By adhering to these
codes of conduct,
business people can
observe standards of
conduct and personal
integrity.

It uses
 Legal terms
 Statutes
 Contracts
That teach employee the rules and penalties for non-compliance.
 Values Orientation:
 It strives to develop shared values.
 Although penalities are attached, the focus is more on an abstract core of
ideals, such as respect and responsibility.
 The company’s value are seen as something to which people willingly to aspire.

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