Segmentation, Targeting and Position free essay sample

Strategies for the selection of Marketing All marketing strategy is built on STP Segmentation, Targeting and Position. A company discovers different needs and groups in the marketplace, targets those needs and groups that it can satisfy in a superior way, and then positions its offering so that the target market recognizes the company’s distinctive offering and image (Kotler and Keller, 2006). a) Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning Segmentation A market segment consists of a group of customers who share a similar set of needs and wants (Kotler and Keller, 2006). According to the segmenting consumer markets, we choose to identify the distinct groups of customers on geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral. For geographic segmentation, it is dividing the market into different geographical units such as nations, status, regions, counties, cities or neighborhoods. We decide to focus on the markets of Hong Kong because we believe that Hong Kong is a potential market for fresh and healthy food. For demographic segmentation, it is dividing the market into groups on the basis of variables such as age, life cycle, life stage, gender, income, generation, education or social class. We identify that as the well-education, people understand the importance of health, people increase their health conscious and people started moving towards low fat and high fiber products to avoid heart disease and certain types of cancer. For psychographic segmentation, costumers are divided into different group on the basis of personality traits, lifestyle or values. As the improvement of the quality of life in recent year, people pursuing health lifestyle, people want to eat healthily so they care about how much calories and nutrition that they are absorbed. For behavioral segmentation, customers are divided into groups on the basis of their knowledge of, attitude toward, use of, or response to a product. As the change of the knowledge of a product, people know which products are unhealthy so that they can avoid it and choose the healthy products. Based on the above points, we can know that the trend towards being healthy is more and more important. However, people are more and more busy of work, they do not have time to cook for themselves so they always skip the breakfast. There is no doubt that breakfast is very important to our health, so we recommend Garden to create a new line to provide convenience, fresh and healthy food to customers. Targeting After a company has defined market segments, it can enter one or many segments of a given market and should make decision about how many and which customer groups to target (Dibb and Simkin, 1996). The selection of potential customers to whom a business wishes to sell products or services is called targeting. According to the segment marketing, we decide to concentrate the targeting on consumers who have health conscious. There are five patterns of target market selection. They are single-segment concentration, selective specialization, product specialization, market specialization and full market specialization. We choose the single-segment concentration to be the target market selection. That’s means we concentrate the marketing effort on one segment of the market. The firm will develop a product that caters for the needs of that particular group. Positioning Position is the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market. The goal is to locate the brand in the minds of consumers to maximize the potential benefit to the firm. (Kotler and Keller, 2006). The position of the product is convenience, fresh and healthy food. There are some approaches of position. For attribute, we provide a meal for customers, not only to eat, but also healthy. For benefit, customers can seek the taste, nutrition, good value and freshness. For value, it’s fresh and good for customers healthy. For culture, this can raise the conscious of healthy in the social culture. For personality, the product is on behalf of fresh and health. ) Marketing Mix Strategies The marketing mix is a business tool used in marketing and by marketing professionals. This marketing mix comprises four components namely; Product, Price, Place and Promotion. These four components are popularly known as the 4Ps of marketing mix. Product A product is anything that can be offered to a market satisfy a want or need. Products that marketed can be a ta ngible good or an intangible service. At the heart of a great brand is a great product, product is a key element in the market offering (Needham, Dave, 1996). As product is very important to a company, we focus on the product differentiation strategies. As we are selling fresh and healthy food, we want to make a difference with the other competitors. Many different bakery stores provide a variety of bread and cake to consumer. All the bread has been earlier made by the store and the ingredient of the bread are limited and no choice with fresh vegetable and meat. Therefore, we focus on providing fresh and healthy food. We prepare a variety of bread such as multigrain, wholemeal and rye. These kinds of bread are all high fiber. And also prepare a variety of ingredient such as fresh vegetable, corn, egg, tomato, celery, cucumber, ham, chicken, salmon, tuna and so on. Thus, consumers can choose which bread and ingredient that they wants, then combine to a fresh and health sandwich. Not only provide sandwich, but also drinks. We focus on traditional Chinese drinks such as red date tea, wolfberry tea and so on. These kinds of tea are helps replenish vital essences and improve vision. The other drinks like honey green tea, wheat grass juice drink are also good for health. All the products that we provide are low oil, low fat, low salt and low sugar formula in order to achieve the needs and wants that consumers who have healthy conscious. Price Price is the amount a consumers pays for the product. The price is very important as it determines the companys profit and hence, survival. Adjusting the price has a profound impact on the marketing strategy, and depending on the price elasticity of the product, often it will affect the demand and sales as well. The marketer should set a price that complements the other elements of the marketing mix (Needham, Dave, 1996). As the price will affect the profit and sales, it is important to us to work out the price strategies. As we are not provide a fixed product, it depends on how many ingredient consumers choose, so we want to set a price by each ingredient. Firstly, we set the maximum current profit as our pricing objective so that we can estimate the demand and costs associated with alternative prices and choose the price produces maximum current profit, cash flow, or rate of return on investment. Then we select the markup pricing as our pricing method so that we can add a standard markup to the product’s cost for profit. Thus, it is easy and uncomplicated for us to formulate the selling price. Place The marketing channels are sets of interdependent organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption (Kotler and Keller, 2006). The producer and the final consumers are part of every channel. As we are selling directly to the final consumers, we are on a zero-level channel, this is also known as direct-marketing channel. Place refers to providing the product at a place which is convenient for consumers to access. As we are selling products to consumers directly, we want to located our shop at convenient place such as alongside the railway or near a business park, for example, most of the consumers are likely to be office workers or students, they are hurry to work, to school and no time to prepare their breakfast, so located near the railway or business park is convenient for consumers dropping in for a breakfast, a sandwich during lunch. Promotion Promotion is all of the methods of communication that a marketer may use to provide information to different parties about the product. Promotion comprises elements such as advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion (Needham, Dave, 1996). A successful product should be communicated clearly to the target market, that’s why promotion is an indispensable part. In order to promotion the product and penetrate the market, we suggest to use advertising to impress consumers what our product positioning is. Web-site is also a method to let consumers know more about product. As internet is well developed, social media provide a chance to us, we can connect with consumers through Twitter and Facebook to promote our product. We can create accounts on Twitter and Facebook, then advertise these accounts and encourage consumers to â€Å"Like† or â€Å"Subscribe†. We can use these social media to announce special deals and offer one-time discounts or free item to consumers. In addition, we can provide some sales promotion, such as increase word-of-mouth publicity for our product through free tastings, or create a card to consumers, when they buy our product they can get one chop. When consumers collect ten chops, they can obtain one free product. This can raise the sales in short term and increase the promotion of product. ttp://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Marketing_mix http://www. buzzle. com/articles/marketing-mix-strategy. html c) Brand Building Strategies Brand is a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors (Kotler and Keller, 2006). Brands offer a number of benefits to consumers and firms and brands are valuable intangible assets that need to be managed carefully. As brand building can create a strong brand, it is necessary to build and communicate the brand messages. As we want to convey fresh and health as our brand messages, we create a symbol for the new line of Garden. The symbol is combined with original Garden logo and leaves. That’s means we use original Garden bread and add fresh ingredient to combine a fresh and healthy product provide to consumers. The reason we still keep the original logo because the logo already built up a strong brand image to consumers, when they see this logo they will think about the product produce by Garden. And the leaves make consumers think of freshness. A great logo is a key to create the kind of branding that lets our product impress in the minds of our customers.