Wm Morrison’s Business, Marketing, and Operations Strategy

Wm. Morrison is one of the supermarkets in United Kingdom dealing in the sales of groceries and fresh food products. It was founded in 1899 by William Murdoch Morrison as a wholesale company. The company developed and grown to the status of a retailing company and thereby became a public liability company by 1918. It was listed on the London stock exchange by the year 1967. The growth and expansion of the company has been through organic and acquisitions.

A company that started out as an egg and butter seller in 1899, Morrisson supermarkets PLC has turned out to become a company that controls over four hundred superstores in United Kingdom by the year 2004. For a company like Wm Morrison, different strategies must have been put into play for the company to be moving forward. “What is Strategy? ” according to Slack & Lewis (2008, p. 5) is a question that “is not easy to answer what seems like a straightforward question”. However, it has to do with setting of goal and planning the path to achieve the goals.

According to Johnson, Scholes & Whittington "Strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long-term”. It exists at different stages or levels in any organization; the corporate, business and the operational (Riley, 2012). Business strategy of Wm. Morrison One of the key factors that define Morrison’s business strategy is its regional business focus approach and its success is quite not unrelated to this. The company was predominantly a UK northern company where it enjoys the dominance of the market through its superstores.

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Marketing Strategy Wm. Morrison The marketing strategy of the company is wound round three factors which are; its pricing policy, the freshness of its products and the availability of products. According to Williamson et al (2004, p. 165) “customers thought that Morrison pricing was extremely competitive and that pricing was an important factor in determining where they shop”. This stand of Morrisson’s customers also supports the view of Chopra &Meindl (2010, p. 42) that “pricing affects the behavior of the buyer of the good and service”.

Apart from the pricing, customers indeed are always happy to get the products they are looking for every time they visit any of the company’s superstores and not only because of the availability but also because of the freshness of the products. The branding of the products in Morrison also gives the customers the perception that they are buying quality at a reasonable price. Operational strategy of Wm. Morrison When the competitive environment of a business is changing, it brings challenges. The concern therefore is what operation has to do in order to meet current and future challenges.

Morrison ensures that its distributions and delivery from its suppliers meet up with demand to boost the efficiency of its operations. For example, the company informed its shareholders in 1994 about its plan to have an additional depot that will replicate the wakefield depot in for the interest of their greater efficiency and to support their further expansion. The company makes its’ operations to be vertically integrated in such that allows it to go into the manufacturing, processing, Packaging, distribution and retailing most of its products.

This indeed is one of the reasons why the company has subsidiaries and facilities. This enables the company to control many activities which some organisation will regard as ‘non-core’(Williamson & et. al, 2004). These strategies were developed based on the view of how the market will evolve and what will be appealing to the customers as well as how to make the best use of the company’s capabilities and they have proved effective in making the company a competitive one.

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