Case 11 Fleet of Foot

CASE 11: Fleet of Foot

Navado Carrillo is facing some difficulties with her retail business. She started her business in 1992, providing serious runners the kind of equipment and advises they needed (she was a nationally ranked runner herself). She committed herself to Nike, especially because of the good quality and good promotion the company would do. After a while she stocked other Nike kind of shoes like walking shoes, aerobic exercise, basketball shoes, tennis shoes. But after some years she thinks she is not as good in serving serious runners needs anymore and these customers are still an important source of sales for the store. After she expanded her stock she had to face competition on more fronts. Then she decided to go for made to order high performance athletic shoes, which customers loved, but the company producing them shut down.

In my opinion, Navado Carrillo’s best option is to focus on the loyal customers, in other words the serious runners. Navado is now considering offering her customers a very similar custom shoe program from another company; they ask for more promotion investment by retailers and a website for promoting the shoes and getting info about the product. I think this could be a very good option for her business. First of all she would have to establish and potentiate her website with a small investment, train her salespeople and then she could start selling and promoting the new custom shoe program. She would be the only person selling them in the area (exclusive sales territories) and she should take advantage of the situation promoting as much as she can on her website and through social networks (easy, efficient and free!). She should also focus more on the technical athletic items and less on the fashion in my opinion because that was the origin of the confusion in the customers’ point of view. She could still keep a more fashionable sector though, like a “corner” in the store. She could also find a way to sponsor and get...