Promotional and Advertising Strategies - Assignment Example

Introduction Ford and GM are both automobile manufacturing companies and are both based in the USA. Both the companies have suffered from the economic depression of the 2008-2009 in the USA (Ford, 2009). The companies have both in the past suffered from the economic crisis that was experienced in the USA in 2008-2009. Compare and the promotional strategies used contrast by two (2) different companies for a similar product within the category that you selected. A marketing strategy refers to that particular process that allows an organization to put its limited efforts and resources on the greatest given resources in order to increase its sales and end up achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. It is a written plan that put together product development, distribution, promotion, pricing approach, identifies the company’s market goals and tries to explain how the goals will be met in a given timeframe (Kawamura, 2011). The survival of many businesses depends on how the targeted customers will accept the products and most of them spend almost half of their capital in carrying out market researches on the factors affecting the markets. Different strategies used by Ford and GM marketing GM and Ford are two very different companies and neither of them has high stock market performance over the past few years. The owners of the Ford still have the primary control of their company compared to GM that is politically controlled and the federal government has some impact on the business (Blanpain & Brulin, 2008). The two companies are very different in culture as well as their marketing strategies. For example, General Motors have pulled itself out of Facebook while Ford is making the platform to influence the world more and more. During the economic crisis of 2008-2009, GM got assistance from the government to overcome the storm while Ford found its way to the crisis and survived (Carroll & Carson, 2010). The social marketing strategy of the two companies is interesting in several ways like, while GM strives and tries to use the traditional methods in marketing their products by abandoning their Facebook account, Ford is on the other hand attempting to embrace the social platform to connect with its customers that give it a competitive edge (Blanpain & Brulin, 2008). Scholars have always talked about using social media as one way of reaching the potential customers of a given product and get a lot of benefits from this strategy. Comparing these two companies, Ford has been ranked as the number one company using Facebook to help itself, their brand and the stakeholders too. Ford is said to understand the ways of reaching the new market while GM does not seem to understand these methods. While GM tries to dictate where it wants its customers to go, Ford, on the other hand, tries to listen to its clients and make products that suit their customers' specifications (Carroll & Carson, 2010). On average, Ford has about 1.5 million Facebook fans while GM has about 378 thousand followers as an essential tool that is not only used to communicate but can get customer views through it. Social media platform cannot be the only tool to determine the success or failure of these companies in their marketing strategies (Cronin, n.d.). It does offer a clue into the company's culture and how their clients view them. Excellent company performance in the market and overcome the competition from their rivals, it is always good to utilize social media as it can play a significant part in instilling more customer-focused culture to the given company. Give a recommendation on two (2) ways where a company within the selected product group could use marketing background for perfect differentiation in the marketplace to gain an advantage over its competitors. The two companies can use information from the market to differentiate themselves from their competitors in various ways and can lead to gaining some advantages from the market based on the accuracy of using the information given to overdo their competitors. They include, Cost advantage resulting from efficiency Efficiency is the input ratio to that of outputs. The companies' Input refers to the materials used in the production process, labor employed and the overheads. The outputs are measured as the number of products or services that a given company produces (Cronin, n.d.). The company between these two that achieves the highest efficiency for vehicle production tends to widen the gap between the cost and the perceived value therefore leading to an increase in the profit produced. Ford and GM can improve their production efficiencies by reducing their company’s inputs or holding the inputs constant while increasing the outputs (De Kluyver, 2010). Training the employees well can act as one way of reducing the labor inputs to reduce the time spent by each person to increase output. Outputs can be boosted by increasing the number of units that a particular production unit produces within a given period. The act of decreasing downtime can also lead to a rise in the production rates. Example, repairing broken machines that delay the process of production leads to an increase in production. Product differentiation Another method of making it top in the market by using information from the market is through product differentiation. The differentiation is achieved through offering some significant differences in the physical properties of the given products. The ability of to create differences in a particular product considerably varies along the range depending on a specific product. Companies involved here can build their automobiles according to the specifications given by their prospective customers (De Kluyver, 2010). The best producer will have the largest share of the customers and will sell most of the units produced with ease. He difference can come from the general characteristics of the vehicles produced that include the features, the performance of the vehicles engines, the design, durability, reliability, consistency and the reparability of the vehicles. Differentiation always leads to a company targeting some specific populations leading to an increase in the sale made by the companies. In the automobile industry, some advertisements can promote the differentiation like that done to GM’s Chevrolets “like a rock’’ advert (Kawamura, 2011). Give two (2) uses of consumer-oriented promotions that could assist a company in both the long term and short term for the product group that you selected The consumer-oriented promotions that these companies may use to reach their customers effectively are as follows, Contests and Sweepstakes It is very healthy for a contest to have an entrant so that at the end of the day there is a winner after some judgment is done and is known as a contest of skill. Again, sweepstakes refer to the random drawing of contests that may or may not have the requirements such as buying tickets or purchasing the products produced by the companies. The two companies can use these sales promotion techniques in improving their sales; the promotions are done by considering the top box or any other token asked for by the advertiser. The companies have to consider between the charities and the sweepstakes and in most cases, sweepstakes stand out to be cheaper to run than the contests and, therefore, the companies may go for these. The considerations of the promotion in which the customers are well versed with, are imperative and must be factored by the companies (Kawamura, 2011). It, therefore, becomes paramount for these companies to choose one of the promotion techniques to improve the sales. Special events The companies may also opt to go for special events in carrying out their promotional activities. The companies need to come up with divisions within their organization to create events that will help them in promoting their products (Carroll & Carson, 2010). The events may go a step further and seek the services of other event organizers who come up with proper promotional ideas and lead to an increase in the number of sales while at the same time reaching more of their clients. There are several reasons that these companies opt to the special events one of them being that the events tend to attract a homogeneous audience to be very appreciative to the sponsors. The meaning of this is that, the product being promoted will receive lots of attention from the audience and the number of sales to be done from the events will increase the sales done by the company. The benefits of this method are that, those employees who engage themselves in the promotional activities tend to be acknowledged by the company through awards and may even receive promotions (Carroll & Carson, 2010). To finalize, the use of this method compared to producing lots of promotional ads is much simpler and contains many packaged elements. In an example, the companies can use the same people to manage their events (Blanpain & Brulin, 2008). They can employ the use of booths, premiums, displays and ads repeatedly by changing their names, dates and places. Strategic manner analysis in which the leading company in this product group has made the pricing decisions by the use of one or more of the four (4) pricing objectives The leading company here has employed the status quo objective in reaching its pricing. The objective refers to a tactical goal that encourages market competition based on other factors other than price. The objective mostly emphasizes on maintaining the market share of the company than beating it (Blanpain & Brulin, 2008). The objective can have a stabilizing effect on the company’s product demand. Suggest two (2) actions that other companies offering the same product group may take in for the sake of differentiating themselves and gaining a competitive advantage The other competing industry may take the following measures in order to distinguish them and gain some competitive advantage, Service Differentiation To acquire competitive advantages, companies need to differentiate the services that they produce from those given by their competitors. Differentiating the Products To stay different from other companies, the competitors should differentiate the physical properties of their products to look different from those of their competitors. The differences will make them be ahead of the other and have a comparative advantage compared to the competitors (Akiho, 2005). Conclusion Even though making advertisements on automobile information sites is the most obvious thing for these companies to take to reach more customers, the method seems to have lots of limitations. Most of those people who visit these sites are not meant to buy the vehicles but mostly to look for the prizes and do some comparisons. Some studies suggest that distributed buying tends to perform better in the end than most of the contextual buys in terms of conversion and response. Ads have proved to do a quit better job in automotive advertisements that have been made possible by the ability to reach and maximize on the available technologies. Ads have a broad client base and enquire can easily be done through several online chats between the parties. Though the use of these platforms can make it in the automobile industry, I tend to think that the use of special events and media marketing can have an impact on the industry. During these events, people tend to have a real sense and have an interactive session with the staff thereby knowing a lot about the vehicles. The result will be that majority of the buyers will develop an interest and, in the long run, turn to be actual customers. References Akiho, K. (2005). Kanmin kyokai kakutei no jitsumu. Nagoya: Shin Nihon HoÌ„ki Shuppan. Blanpain, R., & Brulin, G. (2008). Employment and Globalization relations in the auto assembly industry: a study of seven countries. Austin: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business. Carroll, W., & Carson, C. (2010). The making of a transnational capitalist class. London: Zed Books. Cronin, M. Top-down innovation. De Kluyver, C. (2010). Fundamentals of global strategy. [New York, N.Y.] (222 East 46th Street, New York, NY 10017): Business Expert Press. Ford, G. (2009). Identity. London: Macmillan. Kawamura, T. (2011). Hybrid factories in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Read More