Marketing Plan for a Brand in Trouble Assignment

Marketing Plan for a Brand in Trouble - Assignment Example FW Woolworth's UK subsidiary (Woolworths Ltd.) and B&Q were bought two years later by Paternoster, who are now known as Kingfisher PLC and are still B&Q's parent company. Since being bought out by Kingfisher, employees of B&Q have enjoyed a 20% discount on all products. Mid 1990's saw B&Q open a new format of store known as the B&Q Depot. This was a forerunner of a new class of store known as the B&Q Warehouse. Beckton, Enfield and Romford were amongst the first of the new Warehouse class stores to open (United Kingdom: Case Study: B&Q Direct, 2003). In the late 1990s, B&Q became active in the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. It co-operated in 1995 with parent company Kingfisher PLC to open its first overseas subsidiary in Taiwan, and in 1996 the first overseas large home improvement center in Taoyuan City, Taiwan. In 1998, it acquired NOMI, Poland's leading chain of DIY stores. Later that year, B&Q merged with France's Castorama. In 1999 B&Q opened a store in Shanghai, China and acquired the British hardware mail-order company, Screwfix. By the year 2000, B&Q had fifty of its larger Warehouse stores. This had doubled by 2003. B&Q's Direct's online transactional website, www.DIY.com, was launched in January 2001. By March 2003, it had become one of the largest stores in B&Q and its continued rapid growth will soon make it the biggest store in the group. The site sells a range of 14,000 products and is already the number one store for many heavy and bulky items and many other smaller product ranges (United Kingdom: Case Study: B&Q Direct, 2003). As well as generating considerable revenues of its own, DIY.com is part of a wider, multi-channel retail strategy that includes call centres and catalogues. All channels feed each other. For instance, 10% of those that shop in-store have researched their purchases online. A critical component in the overall success of DIY.com and the B&Q Direct call centres is their ability to process credit and debit cards efficiently and to restrict the level of card fraud. In September 2002, B&Q Direct appointed DataCash, a leading UK-based provider of outsourced payment processing and fraud prevention solutions, to handle the credit and debit card processing for both DIY.com and all its call centres (U.K. Retail Sales Plunge Most in at Least 10 Years: Update3, 2006). Before DataCash was appointed, B&Q had used a software solution provided by a US-based company to handle its card processing. B&Q had two key issues with this solution, one technical and one business, which led them to look for a new supplier (United Kingdom: Case Study: B&Q Direct, 2003). Based on the discussion, "MarketVVizard's Market Thoughts" (2005), European economies U.K. retail sales plunge most in 10 Years. Shares of companies including Plc and Kingfisher Plc declined in London after the British Retail Consortium said sales in stores open at least a year dropped 4.7 percent from a year ago, the biggest decline since comparable figures began in 1995. Domestic demand is clearly slowing a lot quicker than was anticipated even a month ago,'' said Peter Dixon, an economist at Commerzbank AG in London. After an unprecedented run of strength it's time for consumers to stop, regroup, and think about getting their finances back in order.'' British factory production