Coles Market Analysis

Current & Competitive

Supermarkets play an increasing role in the development of the Australian grocery retailing. An enhancement in market share for Coles and Woolworths has created a challenging environment for many Australian food suppliers and grocery stores. Coles and Woolworths have led to current imbalance in market share power and customer loyalty.

The supermarket industry in Australia is dominated by selected groups of retailing companies, including Wesfarmers (Coles) and Woolworths. Both companies have experienced significant growth over the last two decades; they share combined market over 70 per cent of the whole country’s supermarket industry, and a further growth remains a real possibility. The substantial growth of IGA German-owned ALDI and  recently influenced the industry. The remaining 29 per cent is divided between Independent Grocers of Australia (IGA) (7 per cent), AlDI(4 per cent), Australian United Retailers (trading as Foodworks) (2.3 per cent), SPAR and Franklins.

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Source: IBISWorld 2011, Supermarkets and Other Grocery Stores in Australia- December 2011

Target Customer/Market

Coles core customer is loyal and discerning. In 2013, Woolworths commissioned a report, Trolley Tends, found that overall Australia is a cosmopolitan society that consumers looking for a wide range of fresh foods and shopping more often on restaurant-style foods (report available at Woolworths.com.au; Sheater,2013) Traditional Aussie food like ‘roast and three veg’ dinner has been replaced by pasta and Asian Food. Aussie taste has been gone more global.  According to research, housing accounts for the largest parts of household expenditure (about 18 per cent), food and beverages occupy in a close second (approximately 17 per cent). Based on survey, Coles female shoppers reported characteristics relating to pricing, quality and cleanness and male shoppers of Coles considered efficiency, speed, convenience and to be the most important factors. Coles knows that one of the most important customers is a mother who running a whole family in any suburb. So Coles tried to approach to these people with reducing price on household goods. Because Coles have reward system for keeping loyal shoppers, people who hold Coles FlyBuys cards also the target customers. Coles Flybuys, re-launched in 2012 has approximately 7 million members. Once  customers consume with FlyBuys, Coles would collect data to determine the purchasing preference of individuals, sending them personalised specials in weekly emails.

New service innovation

Coles have kept up to develop technology to apply on its shopping system. Coles made a contactless payments system with the new Coles mobile wallet, which lead to keeping on top of deals on consumers’ shopping(Coles, 2014). Customers can apply a pay tag to their mobile phone and use it to make easy and convenience payment with MasterCard PayPass. The mobile wallet also featuring a flybuys barcode, it allows shoppers to collect flybuys points so that even customers forget wallets they can also shopping as usual. The Coles Credit Card app is also included in mobile wallet which offer customers with convenient access to the card balance and transaction history. Moreover,  it is easy for customers to activate their personal offers and  view their latest flybuys points balance on the Coles app.However, the privacy and security of customer finance is not 100% guaranteed, and Coles needs to develop its system to protect both customers and stores finance security.