Question

Imagine you are the product manager for Viking microwave ovens, and have been targeting 10 million consumers in the US for your marketing and sales efforts over the past several years. You distribute your ovens through retailers such as Lowe’s and Best Buy. You are charged with the goal of increasing sales of Viking ovens by 20% over the next two years.

You conduct a survey and learn that of the 10 million target consumers, 9.5 million recognize that microwave ovens can be useful to them. When ready to purchase a microwave oven, 9 million of the target consumers consult Consumer Reports and online buying guides which provide information about Viking ovens, 7 million actively compare Viking to other microwave ovens, and 6 million prefer Viking ovens to other ovens because of their respective features/attributes and prices. You know that 4 million consumers in the target segment have actually purchased Viking ovens, 3.5 million are satisfied or very satisfied with their Viking ovens, and 1 million have either posted favorable comments online or talked highly about Viking ovens with their friends. However, 0.5 million consumers are not pleased with their purchases, and of these 5,000 have posted unfavorable comments online.

Based on the data available to you, what inferences can you draw about your target consumers, retailers and competitors? Sketch out a marketing program you would undertake to attain your sales goals along with its top two objectives.

Answer 1

1. Based on the above data given, we can draw a conclusion that our requirement of target consumers are avilable in the market but because of our product fefatures that are not able to satisfy some of the customers we are loosing them and on the part of retailers, as all the customers prefer to refer to the online reveiws there is not at all any active part on retailers on selling to target consumers and competitors are also imposing a great competition by attracting target consumers.

2. Any business should primarily focus on " retaining the existing customers " by consulting them and should know their problem with product and concentrate on additinal features they will propose by considering their practicality i.e., a good customer service to the existing customers and later what features differentiate our competitors with us. and should also concentrate on increasing the circle of target customers by researching on their difficulties and by good advertising campaign and also insisting the on retailers by the way of benifiting them by incentives,