Aldi’s Marketing Strategy

Aldis Marketing Strategy Aldi have made great strides in entering the UK grocery market. Please analyse Aldi’s current marketing strategy and provide recommendations for how Aldi can enhance their marketing strategy to gain a greater share of the UK Grocery Market. Introduction Marketing in simple terms can be described as offering a right product at a right place at the right time and with a right price. The Management Gurus emphasise on the four Ps of marketing which are often called the marketing mix. These four Ps are Product, Place, Price and Promotion. Marketing mix is an important tool to make an efficient marketing plan for a successful product offering. These four Ps of marketing mix can help achieving the business targets of sales, profit and consumer satisfaction. The essay examines marketing strategies of a German supermarket chain named Aldi, in the UK. The paper is divided in to four sections. The first section gives a brief history about Aldi. The second section talks about its positio n in the UK market. The third section analyses the marketing strategy of Aldi on the basis of the four Ps. The last section gives recommendations on marketing strategies for the future growth of the company in UK market. A brief history of Aldi Aldi, one of the world’s largest privately owned companies, is a grocery supermarket chain with a base in Germany. The name Aldi has come from the abbreviation of Albrecht (family name) Discount. The business started in 1913 with a food store in the town called Essen in Germany. By 1960s this family business was expanded to 300 stores in Germany and that is when the business was separated into two groups Aldi Nord (North) with a headquarter in Essen and Aldi SÃ ¼d (South) with a headquarter in MÃ ¼lheim an der Ruhr (Emsell, 2011). The business was separated over a disagreement on whether to sell cigarettes in the stores or not (Ruddick, 2012). These two organisations now operate independent to each other. On international levels, Ald i Nord operates in Portugal, Denmark, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Spain, and Poland. Aldi SÃ ¼d is functional in Ireland, United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Australia, Austria and Slovenia and United States of America with over 8000 stores in total (Aldi UK website, 2015). Aldi in the United Kingdom Taylor and Lee (2007) have stressed the adverse effects on the international buyer behaviour due to cultural disparities. KPMG (2014) states that the shopping culture in UK is associated with the quality and not necessarily with price. It further mentions that higher level of customer services is one of the main attributes of this culture. That is the reason why in spite of the dominance of the ‘big four’ -Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA and Morrison’s – M&S and Waitrose have done huge investments in the grocery industry. However Aldi has not only managed to attract the customers in the UK by overcoming the hurdles but also has acquired a signi ficant market share. Table 1- Market share of Supermarkets in the UK in March, 2015 Supermarket Market Share (In %) Tesco 28.4 ASDA 17.1 Sainsbury’s 16.4 Morrison’s 10.9 The Co-operative 6.0 Aldi 5.3 Waitrose 5.1 Lidl 3.7 Iceland 2.1 Source: BBC, 2015