Tesco Retailing Marketing

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Coordination is Tesco’s second principle of layout. Coordination refers to the systematic arrangement of items, which helps in promoting sales. Tesco ensures that it locates slow-selling and fast-selling products in strategic positions to ensure that they help in improving the overall sales plan of the retailer. In some instances, managers of the retailer place various items in fast-selling location to increase the sales of the products or to promote a certain line of products (Rook & Robert, 1995).

Convenience is Tesco’s third principle of layout. The layout of the retailer’s stores is designed in such a manner that it facilitates a high degree of convenience to consumers, which makes them have a pleasant shopping experience. The retailer achieves this through merchandising and product placement.

Tesco uses various theories on how layout influences customer purchases. The retailer implements the theories by locating certain products together or near one another to increase the amount of money that customers spend to make purchases. The retailer ensures that it creates a cross-category sales similarity to encourage sales (Levy & Weitz, 2004). For instance, the retailer may place toothpaste next to toothbrush. It may also place sweet biscuits next to coffee. This enables the products to complement each other, which increases customer purchases (Hausman, 2000).

It is vital for retailers to take advantage of high shopper traffic to improve their sales revenues. Tesco ensures that it achieves this by ensuring that high impulse, low price products are located at the entrance to the store. Since the foot traffic of the store is more 30 million every weekly, the retailer strives to capitalise on this number (Ebster & Garaus, 2011). The items located at the entrance to the store where there is high traffic range from 10 to CNY100. As such, if the impulse item can add just CNY5 to the baskets of the average customers, the retailer would experience a whopping CNY150 million increase in revenue.

Tesco’s layout helps in improving its competitiveness. There are clear divisions for each department within the retail store. Below is the layout of a typical Tesco retail store. The left part indicated in green is the groceries area. This section stocks various grocery products, which include frozen foods, dairy products and bakery products. Apparel and housing products are stocked in the middle section (Mathur, 2010). This section also stocks other items, which include electronics and toys. Garden products are found in the right hand side. Tesco ensures that the layout of its stores leads to the creation of open spaces, which makes it easy for customers to find what they are looking for faster.

[pic 1]Figure 1: Layout of a typical Tesco retail store

Tesco ensures that stores have a similar layout regardless of their location. This makes customers feel comfortable when they are shopping in the stores. Therefore, the layout of a store in London is similar to the layout of a store in France or Malaysia. The retailer ensures that products are strategically located to increase sales. For instance, milk and other basic products are found at the rear end of the store. However, the retailer ensures that customers can see the basic products when they enter the store. The location of the basic products necessitates customers to walk past many low-sales products items before reaching the products. This increases their chances of purchasing the low-sales items (Hausman, 2000). Tesco ensures that it keeps reorganizing items to maximise its sales.

Customer Service and Facilitating Services

The activities of all organisations are geared towards meeting the needs of its customers. Therefore, organisations have formulated creative means of meeting the needs of the customers. Customer service helps in improving customer satisfactions, which in turn increases customer loyalty. Tesco acknowledges the importance of its customers. The retailer has formulated several strategies to meet the needs and expectation of the customers (Cook, 2008).

Food is one of the major items that Tesco stocks. The retailer is plays an active role in the formation of food industry policies. The company also ensures that the foods it sells are healthy and have not reached their expiry dates. The retailer also provides a wide range of food items, which range from African to Chinese foods. The retailer also stocks organic foods (Humby, Hunt & Phillips, 2008).

Tesco strives to meet the needs of its customers by seeking and implementing their opinions on product quality and range of products in its stores. The retailer has a suggestion box and customer service desk where customers can comment or make complaints on what they think the retailer is not doing well and provide suggestions on how to make improvements. This enables the retailer to improve the services it offers its customers (Czerniawska & May, 2004).

Different types of customers visit the retailer. These include families, business people, students, disabled, and old age pensions. Tesco strives to meet the unique needs of these people. Tesco provides disabled with wider checkouts to facilitate their movement if they are using wheelchairs. The retailer also provides the disabled with privileged parking. Tesco also strives to meet the needs of families and housewives by ensuring that all products are labelled properly and are positioned at the right place. The retailer also ensures that these customers can get value for money (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2010).

Tesco strives to meet the needs of business people by ensuring that food is readily available in retailer since business people mainly visit the store during their lunch break when they do not have so much time. The retailer also helps pensioners while making their shopping as they may not be able to reach certain items. Bag packers also help in putting the shopping of the pensioners into their bags. Tesco meets the needs of students by ensuring that it has a wide selection of products and special offers (Musso & Fabio, 2014).

Formats and Locations

Tesco has five types of store formats. These include Tesco Extra, Tesco Superstore, Tesco Metro, Tesco Express, and One Stop. Tesco Extra is a large hypermarket that is located out of town. They stock all product ranges in Tesco. Tesco Superstores are large supermarkets that sell groceries and a smaller range of products than Extra stores. They are usually branded as simply ‘Tesco.’ Tesco Metro refers to stores whose size is between Tesco Superstore and Tesco Express.