7 Eleven Pest Analysis

PEST ANAYLSIS 7 ELEVEN

1.1 CompanyBackground(7-Eleven)

7-Eleven, founded in 1927 in Dallas, Texas, is the world’s largest operator and licenser of convenience stores with more than 21,000 units worldwide and nation’s largest independent gasoline retailers. The name 7-Eleven was originated in 1946 when the stores were open from 7am to 11pm. Today, offering customers 24-hour convenience, seven days a week is the cornerstone of 7-Eleven’s business.

1.2 Customer-Orientated Factors

7-Eleven focused on meeting the needs of convenience-oriented customers by providing a broad selection of fresh, high-quality products and services at everyday fair prices, speedy transactions and a clean, safe and friendly shopping environment. Each store’s selection up to 2,500 different products and services is tailored to meet the needs local customers.

7-Eleven is expanding its food offerings to bring consumers a proprietary line of daily-prepared and daily delivered item and baked goods. However, its also offers consumer a number of convenience services designed to meet the unique needs of individual neighbourhoods including fax machines and automatic teller machine.

1.3 Major Players and Competitors

The major players of retailing industry include Coles , Franklins and 7-Eleven. Obviously, Coles and Franklins are the major competitors of 7-Eleven. Coles is a full service supermarket operating 431 stores throughout Australia, its offers

customers convenient shopping that aims to fulfil all of their expectations and requirements under one roof. A major focus for Coles has been to tailor store product ranges and concepts to meet the needs of the local residents.

Franklins is Australia largest discount supermarket, it has a well-established reputation as “the discounter”. The major aim for Franklins is to ensure that the important factor of freshness and quality is established within their discount-orientated format.

1.4 Target markets within the Retail Sector

From here, we can see the differences in the target markets of 7-Eleven and the competitors. As mentioned above, 7-Eleven is focused on meeting the needs of convenience-oriented.

Coles also holds great onus on the customer satisfaction as it offers customers cheap, broad and convenient shopping. Franklins on the other hand concentrates more on price factors, appealing to customers looking to save.

1.5 Critical Success Factors

7-Eleven is the world’s largest operator, franchiser and licensor of convenience stores. Its refines the business strategy to take advantage of their widely recognized brand and to leverage the size, technology and people, and the successful factors of 7-Eleven including the following key elements: Information technology, provide 7-Eleven with a competitive edge. The proprietary retail information system is designed to build efficiencies into ordering, distribution and merchandising processes and to provide timely and accurate store information on an item-by-item basis. Merchandising is aided by retail information system as product availability is improved by ensuring high-demand products are always available.

7-Eleven fresh food program continues to evolve and in this category represents a tremendous opportunity, as food-to-go increases in popularity. Finally, a major success factor of 7-Eleven is the development of new stores and continues to be a major initiative. Accordingly it opened 120 new stores in the United States and

Canada in 2000.

2. Macro Environment / External Market Environment

2.1 Definition

The external market environment is one of the two categories that combined make up the marketing environment. In strong contrast to the direct market environment (micro environment), the macro environment is of a much broader context and can be defined as consisting of “economic, technological, political, legal, cultural and social environments.” (Quester, McGuiggan, Perreault and McCarthy, 2001 pg 69) Many of these individual macro environment categories intertwine, resulting in one or two major outcomes which are summarised in table 3.2)

2.2 Economic Factors

2.2.1 The State of The Nations Economy

The state of the nations economy is a macro factor which can at times strongly influence spending patterns, hence influencing