Woolworths is owned by Woolworths Limited. It is a supermarket chain headquartered in Australia. This supermarket has developed an extensive network in Australia and controls more than 80% of the market share in food retail and grocery. It deals in several products, including grocery, non-vegetarian products, vegetables, confectionery, bakery products, toiletries, kitchenware, home furnishing, footwear, clothes, and other miscellaneous items.
The supermarkets hold various popular and well-known brands as well as private labels from Woolworths that are well recognized. They generally focus on serving customers by providing the lowest cost products across all seasons to customers. Woolworths operates nearly 1000 stores across Australia out of which 976 are supermarkets and 17 are convenience stores. However, in this article, we have discussed the Woolworths SWOT analysis. With the help of this, you will know the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of Woolworths Company.
A Detailed Woolworths SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is widely used by marketing analysts to analyze the following things of a company:
- Strengths
- Opportunities
- Threats, and
- Weaknesses
It can be said that SWOT analysis is a type of strategic planning. This marketing analysis aims to find out and evaluate multiple external and internal factors of an organization. However, we have conducted the SWOT analysis for Woolworths. Let’s read!
Strength:
In marketing, strengths are generally said as what a business does best during its operations which let them succeed over its competitors. Some strength of Woolworths as per the SWOT analysis is:
- Good Customer tracking: Woolworths focuses on tracking its customers continuously by using business analytics tools which are mainly used for the same purpose and social media analytics. These tools help the company in keeping track of customer’s shopping bills.
- Promotions: Apart from good tracking of the customer, the company concentrates on promotion. Woolworths has an aggressive promotion strategy where customers are informed on offers every week. Moreover, they draw attention to the value proposition and try to make a record of the entry-level prices.
- Market leadership: In Australia, Coles and Woolworths are the two major market leaders. Both the companies hold a large part of the Australian retail market. As we have discussed above, Woolworths holds nearly 80% part of the Australian market. In other words, it can be said that the company has lower competition. Also, the huge market share percentage decreases the threat of competition.
Weakness:
Here, weakness means how a company needs improvement. If we talk about the weaknesses of the Woolworths, here they are:
- Confusing positioning: It has been seen that the company uses similar products in a few income segments which creates confusion among customers.
- Partial behaviour in few markets: Woolworths is an Australian Retail Company that primarily focuses on better products and services. Also, it develops confusion by targeting premium and value segments.
- Price wars: As we said earlier that there are only two companies in Australia holding a large part of the retail industry. However, Woolworths have to always deal with the price of the Coles. In order to avoid competition, Woolworths made a different pricing strategy which resulted in a huge loss.
Opportunities:
The most important opportunity for Woolworths we have found in SWOT analysis is “Concentrating on Different Experiences”. A large number of retail chains in Australia have the exact thing to offer and/or to service in the same value segment. For Woolworths, it can be seen as an opportunity to get engaged in creating different things in the store like personalized services, self-checkout, AI-based shopping assistants, personalized loyalty schemes, and more.
Also Read – How do western systems and structures impact on aboriginal and torres strait islander cultures?
Threats:
While conducting a SWOT analysis for Woolworths, we come to find the following threats.
- Focus on Health: Nowadays, the increased awareness and queries on health has made the consumers more conscious of what they shop and how they shop. In today’s market, chemical and organic free products are in high demand. Thus, supermarkets are required to alter their product portfolio so that they can accommodate the changing trends.
- Competition: For Woolworths, Coles is the only competitor. But now, Amazon has moved into food retail and can be seen as another competitor in the coming future.
Also Read – Elton Mayo’s Theory
