Competitive Intelligence

"For your company and it's top competitors, use Google Trends to examine traffic trends, top rising and related keywords, and geographic differences reports.   In a blog post, report on your findings for your company versus the major competitors, and make recommendations to the brand manager of your company on how they might capitalize on opportunities with their marketing strategy. Tie your recommendations to your findings."

Unfortunately I couldn't use Google Trends to search for the company I usually use for these assignments. It kept returning with 'Not enough search volume to show graphs.' I imagine for a smaller company like this that it'll be more difficult to really measure as there is bound to be much less activity surrounding it. This however means the organization should step up their web presence if it's deemed a viable resource. And these days it's almost a sure thing that it would be. So in light of this I will be using something different. I will be measuring the grocery chain Kroger against some of its main competitors: Meijer and Walmart.

 This first image shows worldwide results from 2004 to the present. It should come as no surprise that Walmart dominates at this scope. Meijer and Kroger are more regional and confined within the United States whereas Walmart is global. This makes the information much less valuable until we narrow our scope when we're wanting to compare the organizations. So let's see what it looks like for the US, then Michigan, then Lansing.

Walmart is still significantly ahead in the whole US, but that shouldn't be a surprise. However, if you look at the regional interest you begin to see more interest in the midwest and surrounding states. This is due to the fact that Kroger and Meijer are mostly within that region.

 Now it looks better. It shouldn't be too surprising that Walmart is still ahead but you can see that Meijer and Kroger are much more visible. Meijer is much closer to Walmart than Kroger though. This is likely due to Meijer being a department store as well as a grocery store, just as Walmart is. Kroger on the other hand is almost exclusively grocery.

 And for the sake of curiosity I went ahead and narrowed it all the way down to Lansing. As you can see it's still similar to the Michigan graph. Meijer and Walmart seem more neck and neck however while Kroger is still lagging behind. As mentioned before though this is likely due to the inventory difference between Kroger and its two competitors.

So, what can this tell Kroger but more importantly how can it be used. To answer the first part it tells the organization that they are behind their main competitors in overall search results. It may be a pipe-dream in hoping for Kroger to be equal to Meijer and Walmart in total traffic but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try. Looking at the related searches on Google Trends we see things like pharmacy, weekly ads, and coupons. Kroger can make use of this information by providing and advertising these services more online in order to generate more searches and traffic. Recently I actually noticed Kroger had changed their website which included a newer and more satisfying coupon system, including e-coupons that can be saved onto a membership card. I have the feeling this was to encourage people to visit the website and then the store.