MKTG5001 Group Project: Sem 1, 2019

Background
As many of you may know (and as we will discuss in an early lecture), in 2017 Toys R Us went into
liquidation and in 2018 they closed most of their stores throughout the world. There were multiple
factors in their marketing environment that contributed to their demise after 70 years of successful
operations, which we will also discuss.

But what most of you don’t know is that just prior to Toys R Us launching into the Australian market
for the first time in 1993, the Coles-Myer Group pre-empted them by opening a number of similar
large scale toy stores branded as “World 4 Kids”.

Unfortunately for the Coles-Myer Group, this expansion did not prove to be profitable and they
closed this chain of toys stores within a relatively short period of time. This was an unusual failure
for the Coles-Myer Group, given that they have had good success over many decades with:

 Coles Supermarkets
 Officeworks
 Bunnings Hardware
 Kmart
 Target
 Plus liquor stores, petrol station alliances, and others.

These days the retail businesses of the previous Coles-Myer Group are fully or partially owned by
Wesfarmers.

Your Challenge
Your overall task for this project is to revisit the World 4 Kids retail chain expansion in today’s
marketing environment. The toy retailing world is a dramatically different place (environment) in
2019 than it was in 1993/4. Back then there was no internet, social media, YouTube, Netflix, smart
phones or apps, Amazon, and even home computers were relatively rare. And toys were toys, not
electronic devices.

Therefore, for this assignment, we will assume that your team has been hired as marketing
consultants by Wesfarmers. And they want to know the best way to introduce a toy/entertainment
physical retail store chain into the Australian market.

They know that Coles-Myer was unsuccessful 25 years ago with World 4 Kids, but Toys R Us are gone
now and perhaps that creates some opportunities in the marketplace?

Wesfarmers understand that this is a challenge, so they do NOT have any preconceived ideas of how
the store would be designed, what merchandise it would offer, price points, locations, number of
stores, service levels, or anything – they are leaving that all up to you and your team.

Their only requirement is that it needs to be primarily a physical retail store chain (it can have online
channels as well) and, of course, it needs to fit with their market position of owning dominant retail
chains (that is, they are not interested in a chain of three small corner shops for instance). And don’t
worry, they have money to invest, so the budget is not a problem.

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What You Should Consider
 Review the Wesfarmers Group – get a sense of how they like to operate, what resources and
relationships do they have – how can these be leveraged?
 Review key competitors in the marketplace – existing toy and entertainment retailers,
department and discount stores, and of course, the vast array of online players – remember
to think beyond just toys and look at competitors for the consumers’ core needs.
 Review success stories – look at international chains that are successful in this space – what
are they doing well to compete in today’s marketing environment?
 Review the failures – what went wrong with Toys R Us and what can we learn from that?
What went wrong with World 4 Kids in 1994? Knowing what not to do is also very helpful.
 Review trends in physical retailing across the globe – which ones are applicable to our range
of merchandise and target market/s?
 Review trends in toys/entertainment – this will help guide our merchandise selection and
will probably impact how we design our store.
 What is our target market/s? Will we have a narrow target or will it be quite broad? What
are their needs and motivations? Are the users and the buyers the same or different? Look
to develop some segment profiles to help guide our report and recommendations.

Note: what you will learn in the course, that the above information represents an environmental scan
(internal and external) of the market and our situation. It is the foundational information that we
need in order to design our retail offering and structure our 7P’s marketing mix.

Report Structure
How you structure your report is up to you – it is your report.

However, the fundamentals of any business report should include: a title page, an executive
summary, a short introduction, analysis, key findings and recommendations.

With your report in this case, you will also need to include the key pieces of relevant information
from the ‘What You Should Consider’ section above, plus an overall design of your retail chain
(including an outline of the 7Ps supporting marketing mix). And, of course, a discussion of why your
chosen retail design will be successful in the Australian marketplace.

Word Count
For this report, the word range is 3,000 +/- 10% (2,700 to 3,300 words). This includes all content
from the title page to the end of the body of the report – it does not include the reference list or any
appendices.

No Names Please
To ensure that your report is marked by your lecturer anonymously, only put SIDs on your report,
not names – and please upload to your class submission – only one submission per group is required.

Due the End of Week 11

The report needs to be uploaded by Sunday night of Week 11 = 19 May 2019

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