Walmart & Marketing
Being the retail behemoth that it is, Walmart has no need for marketing to stay afloat. However with over a 10.8% income growth for the 2010 fiscal year (source) I can imagine it spends a pretty penny on marketing each year.
Which brings me to my motive for this post. Long gone are the days of the bouncing smiley face knocking off numbers from price stands among product racks. This fell to warm colored vignettes highlighting families or patriotism or puppies, and somehow relating that to a function and effect of Walmart stores. Ok, we get it, glittering generalities work when persuading the average passive consumer… until the recession came along. Then Wally execs figured out that the best way to sell Walmart’s products was to remind the general public that (rather inarguably) Walmart is cheap. About as cheap as it gets. And they sold it.
It kills me to shop at a store that’s major running ad campaign was based on the phrase “Christmas costs less at Walmart”. But that was the case. I mean, I’m sure Christmas, in a way, does cost less at Walmart. But Christmas (and later “Summer”, “Back-to-School”, “Halloween”, and “Thanksgiving” costs less campaigns) implied that these occasions were hurdles. It was as though these holidays/seasons were obligations that required monetary expense, and that you could get off the hook cheaper by visiting your local Walmart store. And that rubbed me the wrong way.
However, the ad guys won me over yesterday in a genius move. I saw a Walmart commercial that had a very strong statement: “We help families save an average of $2,800 a year, no matter where they shop, based on Walmart’s impact on the economy”
Let’s break that down, shall we? “We help families…” (Wow, that’s nice of them. I’d hate to think of those evil stores who didn’t help families. In fact, they can use the word families broadly here, because “family” does appeal to the all-american nuclear family ideal, with all of its Norman Rockwell connotations, while finding a loophole in that everyone technically has a biological family, so single people, homeless people, and hermits fit in as well) “save an average of $2,800 a year…” (That’s a lot of money, and annually?? — but wait for the kicker…)
“no matter where they shop…“
Um. Ok… Did I hear that right?
That wins.
Say you hate Walmart. You hate their sales tactics. You hate their crowds. You hate their dopey senior citizen greeters or sprawling parking lots or god-awful speckled linoleum floor tiles. Whatever. Despite all of this, according to Walmart, it still cares about you and wants you to save money! Think about that!
Ok, any rational thinking person who gives the matter two seconds’ thought knows that Walmart doesn’t really care about your bank account. They care about making a profit, and they do this by knowing how to convince you to buy things from them, which happens because of low sales prices. Low prices that inspire (inspire? Try mandate) competition amongst other merchants that bring the entire market’s price down enough to “save families” an average of $2,800 a year. What a nice way of saying “We’re putting all of your local independent stores out of business, but in exchange we’ll let you have slight discounts in the form of a few unnoticed-until-we-told-you-about-how-much-you-saved-annually dollars here and there”.
I don’t know what to think about this. I mean, yes, I love that the average family saves a lot of money. But I don’t necessarily like the idea that one corporate entity can have such an impact on consumers who have zero choice in the matter. It is saying ‘We, as benevolent Walmart, are taking care of you, the lowly consumer who knows nothing of business practices, regardless of what you do’. It’s like listening to a politician credit claim. Walmart assumes that you want to be taken care of and comes off like it knows best for the consumer, pretending that the wellbeing of the individual consumer is at its core mission as opposed to, say, profit margins.
But this is only what rational, thinking people notice. And most consumers, as we all know, are not rational, thinking people. Which is why I love this commercial and think it’s genius. Because who can deny it. Walmart isn’t going to change their sales tactics because of a negative impact on the economy at-large. It’s a tragedy of the commons type problem we have here. Everybody is getting some of the benefit, but nobody wants to answer to the price that has to be paid due to that benefit of low low prices being doled out. Consumers will continue, as will Walmart, with their low price trading, and as such Walmart’s moral duty is irrelevant. And as it’s not going to change, yeah, you might as well shop at Walmart.
But even if they don’t, you’re still saving money…
