MINNEAPOLIS -- After decades of courting suburban soccer moms, Target Corp. has set its sights on city-dwelling millennials, according to a report by The Pioneer Press. The shift is part of its small-format strategy that the company hopes will succeed where Wal-Mart has failed with Walmart Express.
"Not long ago, when you thought about that Target guest, you had this picture in mind," Target CEO Brian Cornell told the Minnesota Economic Club. "It was that suburban housewife. She had a minivan. She was a soccer mom."
But this typical shopper "has profoundly changed over the past couple of years," he said.
To find out what these younger, urban consumers want, Cornell and other Target executives have been visiting them at home, said the report. Cornell and other executives are visiting the homes of young single women and Hispanic moms in various cities.
The strategy is reminiscent of what another large company--British retailer Tesco Plc--did to prepare for the opening of its own ambitious but ultimately doomed small-format chain, Fresh & Easy, in California in 2007. Tesco embedded “anthropologists” in the homes of 60 U.S. shoppers for two weeks to analyze their every move and track their spending patterns.
By focusing on urban markets, Target is going after a demographic that Wal-Mart failed to capture with its smaller-format Walmart Express stores, the report said.
As reported in CSP Daily News, Wal-Mart said it will close its 102 Walmart Express locations among 269 stores in the United States and globally to ensure that its assets are aligned with its strategy. Walmart Express stores average 12,000 square feet.
The Walmart Express stores were ultimately unable to compete with nearby dollar stores and other convenience stores, said a report by The Business Insider.
In 2014, Target began testing a new, 20,000-square-foot format called TargetExpress in Minneapolis (click here for a slideshow).
Target started opening smaller-format stores two years ago in more than a dozen other cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and San Diego.
The company initially branded the smaller-format stores as Target Express and CityTarget, but has since renamed the stores simply Target. The company said the name change wouldn't impact its growth strategy for the smaller stores.
"We’re committed as ever to our urban growth strategy, developing stores specially designed for densely populated areas," Target said in a blog post in August 2015.
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