Essay Example on Citi Trends: Home-Oriented Shopping for Middle-Class Urban Customers

This is to inform you about Citi Trends Inc., an American retail clothing stores which deal in relatively discounted products targeting the middle-class urban customers. It established and opened its first store in 1958 at the streets of Savannah in Georgia identified as Allied Department Stores. Citi trends mission targets home-oriented shopping and all apparels and accessories from this store are home-use products. In this regards, I will focus on the nature of these products offered by Citi Trends, pricing criteria compared to competitors, advantages of its location, promotional strategies, and their use of social media.

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The company offers urban fashion accessories and apparels that suit all kinds of families living in an urban setting. The products offered are of high quality and have men, women, and children branding, and this includes products recognized nationally across the United States (Chaucer, 2016). Besides, the store also provides private label products and home decor items with limited assortments. The merchandise offered with the Citi stores has an appealing design for the preference of fashion-conscious customers, more so the African-Americans. The management believes that through a strong business relationship with its business partners, the store is comfortable offering its products at compelling values.

In consideration of pricing and revenue gains compared to its top ten competitors across the country, Citi Trends has had a dismal performance over the years. The dismal performance is due to the unfortunate timing of its apparels which are not pleasing to the customers. Furthermore, there are delays on consumers' tax refund, which at times discourages the retained consumers from continued patronage resulting in potential loss of new customers. Being a store that targets middle-class families with relatively average incomes forces it to have discounted prices.

Regarding the initial driving factors of providing home products at discounted prices to the middle-class urban dwellers, the positioning of the stores fits well as most of them are in city streets. The headquarters is the major supplier lies in the main streets of Savannah of Georgia town with spacious and well established surrounding to accommodate a relatively large number of customers at a given time. Citi trends locate stores in strip shopping centres, downtown business districts and street-front locations to attract consumers (Hanson, 2019). The setting in the store's location criteria helps the Citi Trend to serve its target audience well.

Currently, Citi Trends is running a comprehensive website and group mailing system to do most of the information-sharing regarding their activities. The site is easily accessible and contains all forms of contents about the management, services offered, shareholders information, and any other information necessary for public consumption. The group mailing system is comprehensive to share information with its shareholders and other relevant business partners.

Finally, the Citi Trend has most of its contents videoed on YouTube channels (Guixeres et al., 2017). For this reason, most of the customers are in a position to get the real demonstrations of the quality and pricing of these commodities without physically appearing in the stores. The potential consumers who are You Tubers get to gain confidence in the products offered by the company before they decide on purchasing them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, however much the store has been facing challenges and stiff competition from other companies; it is set to gain more with the strategies in place. The management is looking forward to changing on providing real-time tax compensation and engage more in product promotion as per the letter shared with the shareholders. It is noticeable that a company must invest much in product promotion and marketing to compete favourably from the experience of Citi Trends.

References

Chaucer, G. (2016). Brands, Buying Process, and Product Development. Consumer Economics: Issues and Behaviors, 199.

Guixeres, J., Bigne, E., Ausin Azofra, J. M., Alcaniz Raya, M., Colomer Granero, A., Fuentes Hurtado, F., & Naranjo Ornedo, V. (2017). Consumer neuroscience-based metrics predict recall, liking and viewing rates in online advertising. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1808.

Hanson, S. (2019). The Origins of the Multiplex in the USA. In Screening the World (pp. 9-30). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.