Question

You are a marketing manager for a manufacturer of nonperishable products sold in grocery stores. In this role, you need to make various decisions about how much marketing/advertising support is needed by each product to maximize the profitability of the organization.

Assess how the effectiveness of individual marketing/advertising approaches would be determined.

Discuss how historical sales data, as well as promotional response data, can aid you in evaluating the effectiveness of the individual marketing/advertising approaches. Support your discussion with relevant examples, research, and rationale.

Answer 1

Being a non perishable product doesn't mean that there will be less/no marketing required for it. Any product needs marketing and advertising.

Being a marketing manager gives you the major responsibility of any product's reputation building in the market even before it is released. The following can be the decisions/steps taken by me as a marketing manager of the product:

1) Make sure the product's age is long but not too long that the people forget about it and never comes back to buy more of it.

2) Compare it with the other products (not showing their brands) in commercials and proving the point that your product is long lasting and better.

3) Keep free samples in exteremely small quantities to test and try out for free initially. This helps build customer base and trust for the product.

4) Paying more to the retailers and dealers for keeping the product on the prime points in their stores or shops will help the product to get noticed properly.

5) The commercials through visual and audio media should be detailed, so that the customer can understand the product through marketing only.

Historical sales data and promotional response data, will definitely aid me in evaluating the effectiveness as this gives me a chance to understand that if each of the techniques is bringing us more sales or not. The sales numbers will tell it all. If a technique works well and the sales are giving profit even after the expense of marketing in recovered then the method is effective. If it just keeps the sales on the edge then it is not effective and did not make any significant changes towards sales.

For example let us consider that the product is a rubber water pipe and the retailer has a big warehouse kind of store. Now assume that the product is in market from last six months and it is selling and we have those sales data. Now as a marketing manager I take a decision to ask the retailer to keep our product in the prime points in pipe sections where it is more visible and accessible to customer. Now i observe the sales for next six months and have the sales data. The difference will itself show the increase/decrease/no change in the sales because of my decision.