Identifying Market and Marketing Strategies: Coles and Woolworths

This business research report investigates the market and marketing strategies of two major Australian retail companies: Coles and Woolworths. The introduction defines the market and the project objectives, which are to identify the market and marketing strategies of both companies. The scope of the project highlights the importance of understanding market techniques for effective customer reach and revenue generation. The literature review explores marketing strategies, including the benefits of marketing, and the STP model (segmentation, targeting, and positioning). It also examines the marketing mix (product, place, price, promotion) of both companies, detailing their approaches to product offerings, distribution, pricing, and promotional activities. The report discusses how Coles segments its customers based on behavior, targets Australian consumers with various product offerings, and positions itself as a low-price provider. Woolworths, on the other hand, segments based on psychographics, targets household segments, and positions itself with premium pricing. The report concludes with an overview of the findings and references used. This analysis provides valuable insights into the competitive landscape and marketing approaches of these two retail giants.

Business Research

INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
PROJECT OBJECTIVE..................................................................................................................3
PROJECT SCOPE...........................................................................................................................3
LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................1
REFRENCES...................................................................................................................................2

INTRODUCTION
Market is the term which refers group of customers as well as organisation who are
interested in the product. Along with this, they have resource to buy goods and services or
customers as well organisation have permission in the eyes of laws and other regulations to
acquire an product. In simple term it can be said that, market is is an nominal or actual; place
where forces of demand and supply operates. Buyers and sellers interact with each other with the
motive to trade of goods, services. For taking place in the market area there is requirement of
marketing techniques in which company do segmentation of customers as well market, targeting,
positioning, communicate and so on. This research is based on two organisations one is Coles
which is founded in 1914 on 9th April and its founder is George Coles. They are dealing in retail,
supermarket and consumer services. On the other hand, another company is Woolworth is retail
industry company founded in 1924 and its headquarter is in Australia. This business research is
going to explain, market of respective two organisation and their techniques of marketing.
PROJECT OBJECTIVE
Topic : “To identify market and marketing strategies of Coles and Woolworths.”
PROJECT SCOPE
Scope of project is generally refers to the type of opportunities which assist company in
doing marketing of their offerings. Thus, it is much important for the manager of Coles and
Woolworths to utilise the basic concept of market and its technique so they can reach to each
nad evey customers as well fulfil their requirement. Moreover, there is wide scope for Coles and
Woolworths company of marketing techniques because it will result in customer attraction as
well as generating more revenue. Although, marketing department and team plays crucial role in
exploring business to large number of people and making them aware about the product offered
by respective organisation. Scope of this entire business research is wide and result in achieving
future goals in effective manner.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Marketing strategies is used by several organisations for getting together with their
existing and potential customers. It is also employed with the motive of providing awareness to
customers about the features, specification and benefits of Coles and Woolworths offerings. As

well as it is a long term forward looking approach for doing planning with fundamental goal
accomplishing sustainable competitive advantages. There are many several benefits of market for
Coles and Woolworths when they are doing business to business (B2B) or Business to customer
(B2C) marketing. Benefits of these are as follows :-
 Enhance visibility of their brand offering.
 Develop lasting relation with the existing and potential customers.
 Most important is that improve awareness related to brand as well as recognition.
 Generate loyalty as well as trust of customers with both present and potential customers.
 Attract customers to take decision of purchasing more quickly.
STP model - It is the model of segmentation, segmentation and positioning that can make a
target market position to gain a competitive efficiency. It can demonstrate overall position of
market and how company can chooses and how company can chooses to compete in market.
 Segmentation - There are several ways of segmenting customers such as demographic,
geographic, psychographic and behaviour. Coles is segmenting their customers on the
basis of behaviour. They are focusing on customer’s product and services uses, loyalty
towards offering and what benefits they are looking into goods. Coles can identify market
segment that can focus on a customer that can identify market potential need. This can
help Coles need to ensure that they are able to meet need of customers, by this customers
must be flexible that can determine more suppliers to compete in it and company can
make future profits Coles is used to make a high supermarket that can define more that
we can target only particular customers. On the other hand, Woolworths is large scale
retail organisation and they are segmenting on the basis of psychographic in which
respective company take care of their customer’s personality, values, lifestyle, attitude,
opinion as well as interest. Along with these there are some also such as families,
schooling, religion and society. Woolworths could consider a quality and convenience
proposition, providing customers with high quality products at great value prices at
convenient locations that can make better quality product .From a customer perspectives
shoppers can pay more for grocers for better quality product that can make a company to
be distinguished and be a strongest demographics in single and couples without children
that can make more customers needs and efficiency.

 Targeting – In this factor companies set their target customers to whom they are
focusing. For Coles target customers are Australia which has several cooking habits as
well as fulfilling needs and wants of customers by providing them goods and services.
Respective organisation keeping in mind that there must be some addition of products in
the area of fresh fruits, dairy products and so on. Coles is targeting children and youth
who are in between the age of 10 to 25 years by offering them goods and services of their
need, convenience as well as choice. Along with this they are providing some special
offers with special products which are matching to buyer personality. On the other hand,
Woolworths Is retail organisation which generally target household segment, this is
reflecting by the huge quantity of sales which has been taken place in relation to the
selling of groceries followed by home merchandise. Furthermore, the respective
association has launched large number of women wear as well as fashion accessories and
aim of all this is to target the young female customers which can exist and potential both.
Moreover, the market share of the retail sector in the Australia has been at huge level
dominated by Woolworths Company. This can be credited from the fact that Woolworths
commands over three fourths of the Australian retail market.
 Positioning - This is the final step in which positioning strategy is required for analysing
how organisations will place their offering to their target audience and most important
customers. Moreover, positioning strategy play crucial role in the success of the firm.
Coles is positing themselves as an association which offer products and services at lowest
price. Respective company using pricing advantages to be sustainable in its business
model. Because of their low pricing strategy various same sector retail companies has
destroyed by Coles. On the other hand, Woolworths is large scale organisation and they
are taking position in the market area as premium pricing because price of their offerings
directly reflect values of respective company offerings.
Marketing mix – Marketing mix is for placing right goods or its combination at right place, on
right time with right price. In this difficult part is doing it well, because it requires knowing each
and every aspects of business plan before preparing marketing mix. Below mention is the
marketing mix of Coles and Woolworths :-

 Product – Coles places all its products according to their shelf layout as it want to sell at
eye level of customers. It deals in wide range of product and works with it suppliers to
provide its customers with product that are equally great in quality and taste. They are
currently focused on becoming the best food retailer of Australian market and in this
regard they are working with suppliers to continually deliver quality and availability of
fresh foods. So that suppliers keep delivering great quality of products and able to
maintain long term relationship with them and regularly encourage them. Moreover, the
brand also operates in financial market, offers home loans and credit cards. Whereas,
Woolworth is an leading Australian retailer. It basically provides all type of grocery
items. It does not leave to customer’s dissatisfaction when it comes to choice of different
products. Is products are tested and approved by its experts to maintain is its quality.
Moreover they are dealing in diversified products such as bags, jewellery’s, furniture,
beddings and house ware accessories. These diversified ranges help company to carter all
around needs and wants of customers under one roof. Place – Coles is serving their products and services across the boundaries of Australia
which is from as far west as Geraldton in Western Australia to as far east as Ocean
Shores in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Staff member is the respective
organisation is approx. 102,879 is spread crossways every state all the way through
Australia. Weekly transaction of company is more than 21 million customers at an
average with their physical stores as well as online platform. Moreover, Coles Company
have its approx. 787 supermarkets, 865 liquor stores, 89 hotels as well as 690
convenience outlets across the boundaries of Australia. Thus, in this manner respective
organisation have its footprint all over the nation. Although, Coles is delivering fresh as
well as fine quality products and services to their customers. On the other hand,
wooolworth is currently have approx. 1000 physical stores in Australia as well 950 plus
supermarkets and some other convenience stores. Along with this respective company
deals through online platform also and at the same duration they have developed their
mobile app also for purchasing purpose. Woolworth is wide distribution channel and
providing services to customers in better manner. Price – Price is one of the most crucial factors to be nailed if an organization wants to
become leader in retail industry. Coles has started its journey to become most customer

friendly brands in market as well as focus on its both quality and price (Marketing Mix of
Australian Retail Brand Coles, 2019). They over all focusing in delivering great product
at great prices in order to attain attractive customer experiences. Moreover, they are
always focusing on low prices strategies which means that customer need not to wait for
any kind of special discount or day to shop for products at lower prices. Eventually, this
brand is committed to continue investment in lowering cost of shopping for Australians
and strives to offer real value to its customers by continuing lowering price of weekly
shopping basket. Thus, from such mention strategies Coles are able to attain more
market share in retail industry. Whereas, Woolworths attempts to maintain similar or
slightly higher prices that other retail store in competitive marketplace. With variety of
premium brands in food chain has kept is price competitive in market. Moreover, they are
serving its customers segment both low and premium price. They are also providing
Woolworth shopping cards to its customers which automatically tracks purchases and
also offers discounts in order to reduce paper receipts. Promotion – The retail industry organisations is highly growing and having huge
competition because of several organisations. Thus, it is important for respective sector
companies to implement effective promotional strategy. Coles is the best retail
organisation across the boundaries of Australia as well as Price is an important factor
which play important role in marketing of goods and services. They are using traditional
channel to market themselves apart from their in store and online advertising. Their first
step of promoting themselves is printing press they print price on daily consumable items
and it is part of their packaging. Apart from this as trend of promotional activities
increase they use social media which is the favourite marketing tool of companies now a
day’s main motive behind implementing this is to connect with customers and other
followers. Twitter account of the same company is named as Coles supermarket which
have 37k followers and they tweets on regular basis related to highlighted products and
other offers. Along with this, through social media tools Coles respond as well as solve
their customer’s queries and grievances. Same as on Facebook they have more than 1
million followers because customer gets news about new products and offers posted by
company. On the other hand, Woolworth is also focusing on promotional strategies and
they come with some innovative in the market such as offering loyalty scheme to their

customer in this petrol pump discount is included (Woolworths Marketing Mix (4Ps)
Strategy,2018). Along with this they use online media, magazines and newsletters also
for doing effective promotions of their goods and services. They offer extensive deals as
well as offers for their shoppers.
Above mention are the marketing strategies using by both the organisation with motive of
customer attraction and satisfying their needs and wants. Because it is important to have
better market strategy so that organisations can sustain in market for long duration by gaining
competitive advantages.

CONCLUSION
From the above discussion it has been concluded that, company have to select market by
doing proper research because in which they will going to sell goods and services to their
customers. Apart from this, implementing good marketing techniques play crucial role in
attracting large number of customers as well as generating huge amount of revenue. Moreover,
for making better marketing strategy company have to analyse business plan and then implement
STP model as well as marketing mix also.

REFRENCES
Books and Journal
Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015. Marketing: an introduction.
Hansen, J.M., McDonald, R.E. and Mitchell, R.K., 2017. Marketing Benchmarking, Triangulated
Isomorphism, and Firm Strategy. In Creating Marketing Magic and Innovative Future
Marketing Trends (pp. 533-543). Springer, Cham.
Hadjikhani, A., Lee, J.W. and Park, S., 2016. Corporate social responsibility as a marketing
strategy in foreign markets: the case of Korean MNCs in the Chinese electronics
market. International Marketing Review, 33(4), pp.530-554.
Wensley, R., 2016. The basics of marketing strategy. In The marketing book (pp. 75-107).
Routledge.
Rickard, J.W., Allee, G.L., Rincker, P.J., Gooding, J.P., Acheson, R., McKenna, D.R. and Carr,
S.N., 2017. 206 Impact of ractopamine hydrochloride (Paylean®) on performance of
heavy finishing pigs using a 3-cut marketing strategy. Journal of Animal
Science, 95(supplement2), pp.98-98.
Doherty, A., Kearns, J. and O’Rourke, V., 2015. Integrating mobile into marketing
strategy. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 3(3), pp.279-287.
Doherty, A., Kearns, J. and O’Rourke, V., 2015. Integrating mobile into marketing
strategy. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 3(3), pp.279-287.
Solberg, C.A., 2017. International Marketing: Strategy development and implementation.
Routledge.
Angell, R.L. and Kraemer, J.R., International Business Machines Corp, 2017. Automatically
generating an optimal marketing strategy for improving cross sales and upsales of
items. U.S. Patent 9,685,048.
Hapsari, C., Stoffers, J. and Gunawan, A., 2017. The Influence of Perceived Cultural and
Business Distance on International Marketing Strategy Decisions; A Case study of
Telkom Indonesia International. International Review of Management and
Marketing, 7(3), pp.238-245.
Clarke, I., Owens, M. and Ford, J.B., 2015. Integrating Country of Origin into Global Marketing
Strategy: A Review of US Marking Statutes. In Global Perspectives in Marketing for
the 21st Century (pp. 373-373). Springer, Cham.
Online
Marketing Mix of Australian Retail Brand Coles, 2019.[Online].Available through<
https://www.cheshnotes.com/2017/11/marketing-mix-australian-retail-brand-coles/>
Woolworths Marketing Mix (4Ps) Strategy,2018.[Online].Available through<
https://www.mbaskool.com/marketing-mix/services/17155-woolworths.html>
2

3

1