Tesco Brand and Culture Essay Example for Free

Tesco Brand and Culture EssayCorporate stopping point is one of the main determinants of achiever or failure in a business development practice, because it largely determines how flexible, accepting of change and innovative a company tends to be. Fairfield-Sonn (2001 36) provided a four-layer model of somatic husbandry that included cultural artifacts, cultural history, core ideology and core values that helps to quantify and describe the corporate culture of an organization.Thus, Tescos corporate culture can be determined from its corporate responsibility statements, which describe its core values and core ideologies as well as some aspects of cultural artifacts. Tescos stated core priorities include Ensuring community, corporate responsibility and sustainability are at the heart of our business. Being a good neighbor and being responsible, fair and honest.Considering our social, scotch and environmental impact as we make our decisions. Tesco, 2010) These values have had a significant impact on the way in which Tesco does business, as well as its financial performance. For example, its elaborateness into California was designed to be not only profitable, but also socially responsible. As in the United Kingdom, American interior cities have a food supply problem wherein there are few large supermarkets and the smaller supermarkets do not have an adequate supply of fresh foods, including fruits, vegetables and proteins (Wankel Stoner 2007 223).Because supermarkets are reluctant to build in the inner cities and many residents do not have transportation outside the area, inner city residents do not enjoy an appropriate diet, and suffer health consequences as a result (Wankel Stoner 2007 224). Tescos corporate culture priorities allowed the company to hold opening stores in areas where native supermarkets were reluctant to go, and to provide services to the area that the local providers either couldnt or didnt consider.Thus, they opened stores in u nderserved regions, not only allowing them to express their core ideals, but also providing an opportunity to enter an almost untapped market. Although native retailers have scrambled to enter the markets in which Tesco is instantly providing services in the United States, Tesco will continue to have the advantage in terms of the markets it has already entered it also has a corporate culture that encourages the expansion and ervice of these areas. Another area in which the companys business development practices have both impacted and been impacted by the corporate culture is the founding of lines of natural, organic and free-range foods to its stores beginning in the 1990s, and continuing into its development of the Natures Choice sustainable production lines over the past few years (Tesco, 2010).These lines, which include organic fruits, vegetables, meats and other proteins, dairy products, free-range eggs and other responsibly produced goods, has increased its importance in re cent years to the companys bottom line due to growing awareness of environmental factors by customers. The provision of lifestyle ranges like those above is one of the core strategies of the Core UK strategical business unit (Tesco 2010), as it provides the opportunity to reach the greatest number of customers, particularly those who believe that the way in which food was produced is as important as the food itself.However, this provision is also mandated by the companys corporate cultures core ideals, particularly those of environmental responsibility and awareness. These ideals entered the corporate culture in the mid-1990s, at about the same time as the first environmentally aware lifestyle product range (that of free-range eggs) was introduced (Tesco 2010). Whether the shift in corporate culture inspired the change in development strategy or whether the shift in development strategy inspired the shift in corporate culture truly is a chicken and egg question