FEDEX's Marketing Strategies - Essay Example

? School: Topic: FEDEX REPORT: Organization’s Marketing Strategies Lecturer: FEDEX REPORT: Organization’s Marketing Strategies Product Strategies Product strategies generally refers to marketing policies made about the various products offered by the company to ensure that its product gains competitive advantage over other products offered by competitors in the same area of service or industry (Chen and So, 2002). Broadly so, the product strategy ensembles the market destinations of product, how the products will get to their proposed market destination, factors that will account for success with proposed market destinations and specific products to offer at each market destination. As far as product and market destinations are concerned, FedEx is known to offer the second largest civil fleet service across the United States and other Caribbean Islands including Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic (Breiman et al, 2009). There also is FedEx Ground, which is a dedicated courier service for Canada and other North American countries. FedEx also offers customer specification and tailor services including home delivery, custom and insurance provided through FedEx Trade Network, supply chain service, corporate services, print service, as well as FedEx Ship Centers. As a way of ensuring that its products meet customer specification and needs, there is a dedicated FedEx product named FedEx TechConnect, which offers toll free customer support to customers all around the globe. It has been said that through FedEx TechConect, FedEx creates a competitive advantage of learning from within its own rank, why and how it will succeed with its product strategy. Pricing Strategies Pricing has been said to be a very important marketing strategy for the creation of competitive advantage in a globally competing market. This is because in a market where product quality and market service seem to be relatively the same, most consumers rely value for money to make purchases (Hissam and Daniel, 1999). To ensure that FedEx give the customer such value for money when product quality is no longer a factor because competitors offer product at relatively same quality, it uses price discount to attract both new and existing customers. The price discount on FedEx Ground is one of such popular pricing strategies used by the company to ensure that customers get value for money. What is more, FedEx tries to keep its traditional base cost of service as minimal as possible. For example pick up services are offered by FedEx at a traditional rate of $6 per delivery (Carter, Daniel and Betty, 2006). In relation to key competitors on the American and Canadian market, this traditional cost has been said to be one of the lowest. In addition to the traditional cost offered on pick up services, there is an additional weekly charge of $6 for business locations that make requested pick up services. Placement Strategies In terms of location, FedEx is predominately situated in the United States and Canada. These are where most of its stationery offices are. But thanks to globalization and flight services, this limited placement is not in any way a limitation to the distribution strategy adapted by the company. This is because in its scheme of distribution strategy, the company operates on a borderless strategy whereby it opens up its service to all continents of the world. To make this strategy sustainable, FedEx has an air fleet service dedicated for an inter-continental goods and mail delivery. Even though the company reports of effectiveness with this distribution strategy, experts have said that FedEx could reach a more deepened mileage with its products and services if the company expanded its placement by way of opening more offices and centers across its key regional markets (Icove, Karl and Vonstorch, 2005). It has been suggested for example that the company had continental head quarters, from which it would operate a more decentralized placement strategy. The advantage of such a decentralized placement strategy has been said to be a situation whereby FedEx will be offered the opportunity of giving specific market needs to specific target markets. Promotion Strategies It has been said that one of the reasons or factors that has succeeded in making FedEx a global brand is the company’s ability to associate itself with promotions and publicity programs that take international dimensions. Examples of these can clearly be mentioned as FedEx’s association with sports through title sponsorship of Champ Car World Series from 1997 to 2002, sponsorship of Formula One team McLaren, title sponsorship of Orange Bowl in Miami from 1989 to 2010, and the organization of FedEx Cup, which happens to be a championship trophy dedicated an ongoing PGA Tour. Since sports has been identified to be the passion of most countries, FedEx’s association with sports as a means of promoting its brand has been identified to be a very effective promotion strategy. FedEx is also known to spend huge sums of money on commercial advertisements as a way of reaching out to the populace. In most cases, the company makes use of international media organization so as to give it very wide mileage. Employment Outlook for Graduates Graduates with various course backgrounds may have a lot of hope in FedEx in terms of availability f employment opportunities that meet their area of specialization. This is because FedEx operates as a multivariate international company that makes use of the services of academic expertise from different course areas (Icove, Karl and Vonstorch, 2005). As a matter of fact, it has been said that FedEx has so much space for employment variety that it can easily great an employment Gateway on the internet, where graduates can go and register their academic details and wait for a simple email, detailing them on available job openings that meet their academic credentials and areas of study. As a public courier company with as many as five (5) subsidiaries and currently employing 300,000 people across all continents of the world, FedEx gives employment hope for graduates with academic background in areas such as marketing, accounting, business administration, management, mathematics, human resource management, computer science, planning, logistics, commerce, actuarial science, public relations, social services, among other key academic areas of study. Generally, graduates will be faced with two major opportunities when it comes to job openings at FedEx. These are FedEx full time salaried job openings and FedEx hourly jobs. The selection criteria as to whether one lands on a full time salaried job or an hourly job depends on a number of factors such as the FedEx Corp Company in question, the course of study and personal potentials of the graduate (Humphrey, 2001). In terms of hourly job openings, there could be jobs such as courier, feeder agent, customs brokerage, field line airline maintenance, international document agent, facilities maintenance, operations maintenance, package handler, ramp agent, truck driving, revenue service, service agent, among others. As hourly jobs, most graduates are expected to take up these jobs on part time basis instead of full time. Even more, graduates may choose to take up these hourly jobs on a seasonal basis or on a contractual basis. Most of these hourly jobs exist for various FedEx Corp Companies such as FedEx Ground, FedEx Home Delivery, FedEx Flight, FedEx Express, FedEx Corporation, FedEx Custom Critical, FedEx Trade Network, among others. In terms of FedEx full time salaried jobs, there are a number of job openings that a graduate may possibly land on, depending on academic area of study, specific FedEx Corp Company offering the job, and personal skills and knowledge possessed by the said graduate. On the whole however, there could be employment in job categories such as accounting, administration, finance, communications, marketing, courier, engineering, customer service, electronic commerce, flight air managements, freight forwarding, human resource, international relations, legal aid, management, operations, purchasing, retail, supply chain, warehouse, among others. Within these areas of job opening, a graduate is likely to land on a job from various FedEx Corp Companies such as FedEx Office, FedEx Home, FedEx Smartpost, FedEx Ground, FedEx SupplyChain and FedEx Express. As full time salaried works, potential employees must be ready to accept permanent postings that come with the signing of contracts spanning into years of dedicated service. It must also be stressed that the vastness of the employment openings is in no way a suggestion that FedEx may be endangered of employees and so would accept mediocre qualifications. Graduates who want to pick up jobs with the company must be ready to show very high levels of competence and must consider their job areas as a global competition. Cited Works Breiman, L., Friedman, J., Olshen, R., Stone, C.J. Classification and Regression Trees. New York: Wadsworth. 2009. Print. Carter, D., Daniel, R., Betty, S. 2006. “Does fuel hedging make economic sense? The case of the U.S. airline industry”, Financial Management, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 53-86. Chen, C. C., So, R. W. (2002), “Exchange rate variability and the riskiness of US multinational firms: evidence form the Asian financial turmoil”, Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Vol. 12, pp. 411-428. Hissam S and Daniel P. “COTS in the Real World: A Case Study in Risk Discovery and Repair.” Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute: Pittsburgh, PA 1999. Print. Humphrey, W. S. Managing the Country Process. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., 2001. Print. Icove D, Karl S, and Vonstorch W.,Country Analysis: A Marketing Strategy Handbook. O’Reilly and Associates, Inc., 2005. Print. Read More