RETAILING MANAGEMENT

Retailing Management Research

[Name of the Institute]

Retailing Management Research

Introduction

TESCO and Sainsbury are two main supermarkets in United Kingdom, which are the most used markets. The foot traffic at both the supermarkets is massive, and both give competition to each other in the way or other. Tesco has goodwill all around the world, that its cases are being studied in different business universities around the world. Similarly, Sainsbury also has goodwill, but Tesco has given it a huge competition. The following paper discusses both the brands and their comparison.

Tesco

Tesco has a wide range of product offering for its customers. It keeps changing the product assortments according to the need of the customers, and according to the way consumers behave on looking at a product. In 1919, Tesco Plc was established by Jack Cohen, by utilizing the bonus which he achieved for his services in the World War I army. Then in 1924, he purchased a tea consignment from the company TE Stock well. He decided to put the initial three alphabets of TE Stock well, and the initials of his name Cohen collectively to name his brand 'TESCO'. In 1929, Cohen opened the very first Tesco store in Edgware, London. Originally, Cohen's formulated the strategy of “Piling it high, selling it cheap.” Despite the fact that this strategy assisted Tesco in attracting a great amount of consumers, it also assisted Tesco in branding itself as a store for average class consumers and even earned an image as a low-end store.

Furthermore, Tesco had small and poorly equipped stores, as well. The only competitive edge Tesco had been the price. The products that were available at the store seemed to be of ordinary. The rise in the income of customers in Britain caused the customers did not want to look for bargains (Datamonitor.com 2011, pp.4-27). They were now seeking high quality products. In order to cater these changing demands of the customer, Tesco decided to close down its numerous stores to focus on super stores to provide improved quality.

Product and Service Category

Tesco has focused on providing the wide scale of product category to its customers. The main categories which it provides are as follows,:

Grocery

Clothing

Wine by the Case

Music, films and games

Phone shop

Baby and Toddler products

Home Products

Cars

Apart from products, it provides services such as

Photo centre

Opticians

Travelling agents

Gas and Electricity bills payment

Price Check

Gold Exchange

Product Assortment for Non-Food Category

Tesco has also focused on developing non food categories, such as electric category. In 2009, Tesco teamed up with Dream Works studio for the selling of animated film Merry Madagascar. This unique partnership gave an opportunity to sell millions of DVDs and built a new kind of business relationship (Achrol 2003, pp.146-63). The company pursued competitive pricing strategy in electric category along with Tesco Tech Support in around 190 large stores across UK, to help customers make right decisions. As a result, the company has grown rapidly in non-food segment.

Amazingly, in 2010, one in every small screen TVs and one out of every 6 microwaves sold in the UK was ...