Walmart

Robin Mack November 10, 2012 MSCI 5026 Issues Management Prof. Ruth Mack

Wal-Mart’s Katrina Aid

1. How effectively did Wal-Mart establish trust as it responded to Katrina?

A company’s reputation is attention grabbing! Daily, news headlines detail the positive and/or negative perspectives held by employees, consumers, and shareholders of a company based upon the estimation of how well that company met expectations. For example, Google and Amazon.com are companies consistently ranked as leaders according to the 11th, 12th and 13th Annual RQ®The Reputations of the Most Visible Companies reports (Harris Interactive, 2010, 2011, 2012), and have successfully bridged the gap between reputation and positive consumer behavior. A good corporate reputation is developed within an organization, and is a long-term commitment to a process focused on achieving external expectations. Warren Buffet once pontificated, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” A changing public perception became an insurmountable challenge for the retailer after its founder, Sam Walton died in 1992. Sam’s charisma and “pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps” attitude with a customer-centric approach was an important driver of Wal-Mart’s success and created a working environment with full employee (“associate”) buy-in.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman of the Board on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

Sam Walton

(www.searchquotes.com)

As a low-cost, high volume retailer, Wal-Mart’s reputation was frequently under fire for: unfair internal labor...