Customary Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines

Customary Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines

In Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines, Treacy and Wiersema

highlight three distinct “paths” or strategies to market leadership.

They include operational excellence, customer intimacy, and product

leadership. This paper will highlight how Wal-Mart has successfully

implemented the operational excellence strategy, as well as consider

future initiatives within this strategy that Wal-Mart can still

incorporate. The discussion will than focus on the customer intimacy

strategy and explain how Wal-mart has also incorporated this strategy

in a variety of its operations. The product leadership strategy will

also be briefly discussed, however, due to its limited scope in this

particular environment, it will not be emphasized.

Wal-Mart has effectively implemented an operational excellence

strategy in its quest to continually lower costs and deliver products

and services with minimal difficulty or inconvenience. Whether it be

through reducing costs, through its various relationships and

practices with suppliers or controlling energy consumption by

monitoring and controlling lights, heat, A/C, etc from their head

office or even managing inventory efficiently, Wal-Mart has

effectively minimized both variable and fixed costs while also

ensuring stock outs are minimized. Wal-Mart has also effectively

eliminated (non-value) added production steps as it successfully

re-defined the integrated retailers relationships with its

manufacturers. Wal-Mart has also been successful in implementing a

variety of IT systems that have also facilitated this strategy.

Whether it’s through their own...

... middle of paper ...

... other employees? The skill level

of employees would also dictate, what services could be offered at the

various branches, which leads into what financial services entails.

Does financial services simply mean a financial institution where you

can have a savings, chequing or credit card accounts and have other

services such as payroll cheque cashing, money orders, etc. or would

this encompass investment accounts, etc. in which employees would have

to be very thoroughly trained and certified. Due to the limitations

of the later, financial services would be deemed as the first

description. Although, on examining the Wal-Mart website’s financial

services page, it only offered credit cards, which is interesting.

Was this the intended expansion strategy, or did other factors impede

further product or service expansion?