Question

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT COURSE

Soft Drink Exercise - relates to chap 7 mostly marketing strategy

You are the COO for Jones Soda Company and are considering a new high end bottled water product. In preparation, you are doing marketing research to consider competition and are developing a strategy. Consider the company website.

You are developing a plan to decide what should you do and how should you approach this. Respond to the following questions in a paragraph:

Explain the marketing segmentation of customers for this possible product. What is the positioning in terms of the 4 P’s of marketing? What role could or should social media play in the product? Develop a perceptual map and what are your findings.

Answer 1

Ans 1. :  Market segmentation pertains to the division of a market of consumers into persons with similar needs and wants. Market segmentation allows for a better allocation of a firm's finite resources. A firm only possesses a certain amount of resources. Accordingly, it must make choices and incur the related costs in servicing specific groups of consumers. With growing diversity in the tastes of modern consumers, firms are taking note of the benefit of servicing a multiplicity of new markets.

Market segmentation can be viewed as a key dynamic in interpreting and executing a logical perspective of Strategic Marketing Planning. The manifestation of this process is considered by many traditional thinkers to include the following; Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning.

The bottled water is segmented according to the type of consumers:

· Foreign Tourists - Foreign tourist have been the main consumers of mineral water as they face a lot of digestion problems due to different food habits.

· Domestic Tourists - Domestic tourists have switched to mineral water mainly because of safety and hygienic factors.

· Health / Fashion Conscious - Like soft drinks, drinking mineral water is also considered fashionable by some people.

The bottled water consumer is mainly in the age group of 20 – 35 years and is an educated middle class person. This is also the segment of fruit drinks, which have usually been positioned as fun and health drink for young adults.

The bottled water market is segmented along pack sizes:

· 500 Ml Bottle - This is meant to spell safely and security for consumers. This has been introduced in the market to target the individual and local travelers.

============================================================================

Ans 2. : According to the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC), businessmen and women should take into account the four “Ps” to position a product in the market: product, price, place and promotion.

The use of a marketing mix is an excellent way to help ensure that ‘putting the right product in the right place,…’ will happen. The marketing mix is a crucial tool to help understand what the product or service can offer and how to plan for a successful product offering. The marketing mix is most commonly executed through the 4 P’s of marketing: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place.

The four Ps — Product, Placement, Promotion and Price — help you do that.

1. Product.: The foundation of any business is the item or service you are selling. ...

2. Placement : The second P stands for placement, which covers how the product or service will be delivered. ...

3. Promotion..

4. Price

Ans 3 : Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email and their websites to connect with current and prospective customers. This can also be referred as ‘online marketing’, ‘internet marketing’ or ‘web marketing’. In simple terms, any form of marketing that exists online is called as Digital Marketing.

Digital Marketing process broadly involves the following steps:

• Research
• Plan and Strategize
• Implement
• Measure and Audit
• Optimize

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media Marketing, as the name suggests, is a digital Marketing channel used to promote and market brands or businesses on various social media platforms. Some of the popular social media Marketing platforms include Face book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. The platforms you choose depends on whether you are B2B or B2C apart from a whole lot of other factors including your brand’s business goals. Email marketing is a digital marketing channel which is used to market brands and businesses through emails. It is a way to reach consumers directly interested in your business at a .relatively low cost

Benefits of Digital Marketing :

It helps the business to have global reach

As compared to traditional marketing, it is economic in nature

It helps to track and measure the reach for your product/service

It helps you to promote in a personalized manner

It helps your business to get engaged with the prospective customers

Ans 4 :

A perceptual map is of the visual technique designed to show how the average target market consumer understands the positioning of the competing products in the marketplace. In other words, it is a tool that attempts to map the consumer's perceptions and understandings in a diagram.

WHY USE A PERCEPTUAL MAP?

There are multiple reasons to use perceptual maps, some of these include:

· We get a true understanding of how our brand is perceived in the marketplace

· We can track how the perception of our brand is evolving over time, with new products and campaigns

· We can track the perception of competitor products and measure the impact of their marketing strategies

· We can identify positioning preferences (i.e ideal combination of product attributes) for different market segments

· We can identify possible gaps and opportunities for new products

· We can identify possible opportunities for repositioning our brand