The Marketing and Sales department at Asda try to identify what the customer’s needs are and seek to provide them. The staff aim to basically achieve high product and service sales by initially putting themselves in the shoes of their potential customers and ‘view’, through their eyes, what marketing and sales techniques are the most effective and have the most impact on the customer.
From this unique perspective, the marketing and sales team are able to achieve high sales by marketing and targeting products and services through the most effective means of advertising and communication. To Asda, the marketing department is more than just a split function, in other words, everyone is focussed on gratifying the customer’s needs by providing the right products, the latest items at the right time at the right price.
An essential criteria for a member of the marketing and sales team is to have excellent skills in creativity, prediction, communication, research, sales and insight into what customers needs are and how Asda can best satisfy these through their product ranges. Asda’s Marketing department try to keep an interest in what else they can do in addition to satisfy the customers needs and try to find out what additional needs the customers have, which they or other supermarkets have not realised or taken full advantage of.
For instance, in the past, the marketing and sales teams have very successfully identified that their customer’s needs demanded better facilities such as cafes, toilets, various types of trolleys and car parking spaces for families and the disabled, the availability and convenience of other regular high street services such as petrol forecourts, car washes, dry cleaners, opticians and more electrical and home ware goods.
More recently and much to the annoyance of other supermarkets, the marketing and sales team at Asda have lead the way in very successfully identifying that more conveniences are needed for the average hard-working family and so have introduced 24-hour openings, internet shopping, better baby facilities, home deliveries and take-away style shops in which customers can simply take-away freshly made pizzas and authentic hot Italian, Chinese and Indian take-aways.
Furthermore, once having established this need and potential for increasing sales turnover, the marketing and sales department then successfully launched an advertising campaign through television and in-store taste sessions and posters to tempt customers to try their delicious take-away foods.
The team have also been successful in tempting those customers who perhaps had no intention to purchase hot food from the Asda take-away food counter, by providing taster sessions, attractive and tempting presentation of the various foods on offer and effective branding and colourful packaging. The responsibility for designing, branding and attractive product packaging lays also with this department. A corporate company such as Asda always try to keep one step ahead of the customer by finding out their needs and fulfilling them.
Asda puts its customers at the top of its priority list in every operation it takes on. When Asda launches a marketing and sales operation for a specific product or service, its marketing team work on the best techniques for advertising and communicating to its customers how their specific products can fulfil their needs whilst the sales team take on the responsibility for actually providing the goods or services their customers require. This team plays an absolute vital role in the business activities of Asda.
To illustrate just how important the contribution from this area of business is, one only needs to consider all the factors the general public associate with Asda and realise that it is the marketing and sales department that have successfully branded these factors and images on our minds. These factors, branding and images include those such as the ‘pocket the difference’ and ‘rollback’ advertising campaigns, the bouncing smiley face ASDA icon, ‘George’ range clothing etc.
If it was not for the marketing and sales team, there would be no heavy advertising campaigns such as ‘Pocket the Difference’ and ‘Rollback prices’ which encouraged and tempted potential customers to shop at Asda and make significant savings, Asda would cease to trade as possibly the leading and most well-known of the supermarkets and customers would not famously associate the brand name ‘ASDA’ with choice, quality and value.
The function of the finance area of business is vitally important to the activities of Asda as it allows the organisation in general to assess and calculate sales and profit turnover, keep within allocated budgets and generally measure the success of the other business departments by assessing how much revenue is coming in or how much of a loss is being made. The responsibilities for the finance team include the production and recording of financial data such as invoices, budgeting, accounting, profits, sales income and outgoings for expenses such as advertising, employment, purchases, rent, electricity, credit agreements, loans etc.
The team also assist the manger in making vital decisions, collecting statistical data and setting realistic financial targets. The department is also responsible for making payments to suppliers for the goods they sell. Another job of the finance department is analyse statistical data and compare and contrast with previous years, allocate budgets, give advice on business improvements such as setting and keeping to department budgets, financial record keeping etc.
