Marketing Mix Critique and Analysis: Masters Home Improvement Stores - Assignment Example

? Marketing Mix Critique and Analysis: Masters Home Improvement Stores, Australia. Marketing Analysis In a modern business environment, businesses are finding it harder to navigate through the market and satisfy the consumers' needs as the number of issues in the marketing environment increases. These factors affect Masters Home Improvement Stores, which is recent an Australian store retailing home appliances to customers. Part 1Marketing Environment Analysis– Micro Trends Competitors The marketing environment is becoming very competitive and there are issues which must be considered. Competitors are becoming more aggressive in their approach to selling their products to the customers (USA International Business Publications, 2007). Masters home improvement has a keen eye on online selling which encourage other. However, the aggressive competition started with Bunnings in big-box retailing. Bunnings has already taken a remarkable place in the electrical product sales business and Masters Home Improvement improve in this sector .The aim of this competition is to be competitive in the market .Finally Masters Home Improvement Stores should be able to look at the way the competitors are dealing with the environment and thereby look at the ways in which they may be losing their strategic edge. Failing to do this will only mean that Masters Home Improvement Stores will not be able to handle the competitive market. Customers Customers are also another micro factor and must be considered in a more fundamental way. This is why customer service is becoming another very important part of the marketing mix (Miller & Jentz, 2007). In a modern world, customers have an ever greater choice for the products they want and it is therefore necessary for the business to know how to motivate the customer to choose buying from it and not the competitors. Masters Home Improvement must be able to take care of its customers if it is to be able to deal with the market issues. As Barlow (2010) says, customer service in today’s global business environment is no longer limited to just speaking nicely to the customer. In trying to have better relations with the customers, loyalty programs are becoming very popular with every business which wants to retain its customers and Masters Home Improvement needs to be more vigilant of this. These programs serve two important purposes in the modern marketing environment. The first such purpose is rewarding the customer in order to make the customer feel wanted and appreciated (Solomon, 2012). Masters Home Improvement has several ways in which it tries to achieve this. When the customer feels appreciated, they are more loyal to the firm and are likely to come back over and over again. At the same time, as Dezalay and Garth (1996) consider these customer loyalty programs help in hooking the customers to the firm because the customer is only rewarded depending on how strong their loyalty to the firm is. As a result, the customer loyalty reward systems also help in increasing the volumes of sales per customer as the customer will be lured to buy more because they know that the more they buy the more points they will have (Tschohl, 1996). Part 2Marketing Environment Analysis– Macro Trends Technology One of the biggest issues that Masters Home Improvement faces today is technology. With regard to Masters Home Improvement Stores, technology is an important thing to consider because most of their products are technology based. With the current rate of technological growth, new products keeps coming up and customers are always spoilt for choice with regard to variety. In this regard, Masters Home Improvement Stores must be able to know that it is keeping step with the new technological products so as to know that the customers will not go elsewhere seeking for better more modern products. Technology has provided the customers with many options for every piece of technological device. Demographics Demographics also play an important role in the development of the marketing mix. For Masters Home Improvement Stores, this is important because the products they are selling are likely to be affected by the demographics of the population. This is especially so with regard to the lawn mower. People of different ages, gender and economic ability are likely to want to a different brand of the lawn mower depending on what they are looking for. For instance, males are likely to go for the bigger more masculine products while the females are more likely to go for the smaller feminine products. There is also bound to be differences between the taste of the younger and the older generations and Masters Home Improvement Stores must know how to bring the right diversity for the product. Part 3marketing mix The marketing mix for Masters Home Improvement Stores includes a variety of access points for the products which Masters Home Improvement Stores sells. The customers are able to buy goods from the online shop as well as the brick and mortar stores which are spread across the country. The prices are also competitive and are more likely to be able to attract the customers. The firms also provides a number of products which giving the customer a range of high quality products to choose from when they need to buy a specific one. Effectiveness The effectiveness of the marketing mix can be measured in terms of how it meets the criterion of a modern business (Petersen, 2011). The biggest challenge of the marketing mix for Masters Home Improvement Stores is product diversity. Being a retail store for home appliances, Masters Home Improvement Stores seems to not have quite sufficient product diversity. As Pride and Ferrell (2012) aver, product diversity is very essential for the firm to be able to meet the needs of all the customers in order to make sure that every potential customer is served. Masters Home Improvement Stores has failed in this area because a closer look of the firms online retail store indicates that the firm does not have a completely diverse stock. At the same time, it appears that the firm fails to be able to have adequate customer contact centres. While Masters Home Improvement Stores has been able to have an online presence, the process of customers getting through the products and picking the products to buy them is not as easy as most online retail stores provide for. For this reason, it is possible that the firm loses a lot of revenues when and where the customer is not able to easily navigate through the online store and check out successfully. The online store is not designed well enough to promote customers’ desire to buy. The website fails to act as an online catch-point which can give the customers the appetite to click on things and buy them. Online shopping should give the customer an experience that is as good at the traditional experience. In fact, as Armstrong and Kotler (2011) testify, it should give them an experience thick is even much better so that they can choose to use it as opposed to going to the traditional brick-and-mortar shop. This is however not the case with the Masters Home Improvement Stores online store because it does not make the customer to feel that they want to click more and more on the products. Despite the many areas where Masters Home Improvement Stores has failed, they have managed to personalise the online shopping experience by creating an application which logs in the customer and stores personal information. This as Kotler et al. (2008) clarify, is very important in helping to keep the customer close to the firm and to make them have a personal feel while shopping. This is important because the firm must be able to retain a personal relationship with the customer in the long run. Part 4 Marketing Mix Redesign Product: Lawn Mower One of the products in offered by Masters Home Improvement Stores is the lawn mower. Lawn mowers are very popular products with the home owners who have to keep their lawns well kept. This product comes in a number of brand varieties as well as the variety within the brands. Price Pricing is a very important part of the marketing mix, especially in a very competitive market environment which calls for the firm to be able to look at the ways in which to deal with competition from outside (Kemmer & Boden, 2012). Masters Home Improvement Stores should be able to price their goods competitively in order to make sure that the customers will not be turned off by the price. In a highly competitive market, low profit margins are proffered over high profit margins (Codita, 2011). This is because if the firm has low profit margins it can increase its revenues with large sales revenues as opposed to having large profit margins but low sales volumes. The lawn mower is diverse in terms of the available brands. However, the product fails to meet the right amount of diversity in terms of the quality of the products. Most of the available products in the store are of a much lower quality and this can be an issue. In this regard, it is necessary for Masters Home Improvement Stores to introduce diversity for the lawn mower. Place Having an online store as well as brick-and-mortar store is good for the Masters Home Improvement Stores because it increases its contact with the customer. However, there are issues which can be identified with the online shopping experience and these needs to be addressed in order for the firm to be able to deliver its goods to the customers in a god way. For instance, the website will need to be redesigned in order to make it sleeker and more attractive to the customers. This will help in encouraging visitors to stay much longer in the website and for them to explore the various products available (Scupola, 2009). The lawn mower can be bought online as well as on the five brick and mortar stores. Since most people who buy the lawn mower are not likely to be the young people who are conversant with the online shopping, Masters Home Improvement Stores should consider increasing the availability of the products in physical shops as opposed to online. Promotion Promotion takes a number of issues which range from advertising to giving the customers sale offers. In this case, Masters Home Improvement Stores must be able to look at this and know where they need to do more promotion in order to attract more customers. The firm must look for the various ways in which it can promote its business in order to expand its market share and also to avoid becoming obsolete in the future. For the lawn mower, there are no specific promotion processes which are currently being offered. This can affect the sales of the mower in a very negative way. Masters Home Improvement Stores should offer a number of promotion processes such as sale offers for the mower. For the smaller ones, buyers of other products can be offered a discount on this item if they buy shopping worth a certain amount of money. To encourage the online shopping, the shop can give a discount for any online purchases of the lawn mower. Processes One of the challenges which the customer faces is the process of buying merchandise and transporting them to their homes (Pride &Ferrell, 2011). Masters Home Improvement Stores need to make sure that the processes are easy and customer friendly in order to encourage the customers to buy more. The processes which will especially need to be improved include the online store in order to make it more friendly and easy to navigate from one area to the other. The website should be made easy to navigate to encourage the customers to look at several products and explore the various options and various brands of a particular product. People Masters Home Improvement Stores should be able to look at the various ways in which to improve the people systems in order to have systems which are more integrative. This will include the customer loyalty reward systems which must be looked at in order to make sure that the customers feel at home with Masters Home Improvement Stores. Masters Home Improvement Stores should start promoting this product for the different demographics in order to increase its market share. Part 5Recommendations Masters Home Improvement Stores must have a more direct way of marketing its products in order to attract more new customers and at the same time retain the already existing customers. This is because all the competitors are doing this in their attempt to expand their customer base. As a business, Masters Home Improvement Stores will need to engage the customer at a very personal level through direct marketing in order to retain its strategic edge. Direct marketing and going nearer to the customer is one trend that is coming up with many businesses (Dholakia, 2002). Masters Home Improvement must use direct marketing in order to be able to survive in the competitive environment. More importantly, they will need to redesign the online store to make it more attractive and sleek to attract as many customers as possible. In this regard, Masters Home Improvement should contract a web design company which has an experience in designing and developing online retail sites. This will help in redesigning the online retail so that it will be easier and more useful to the users and the visitors. Masters Home Improvement must do this while keeping in mind the effect that the online shop has on the marketing mix, especially the issue about place and price. In this regard, Masters Home Improvement should use the online retail to improve on the accessibility of its products and the same time provide better price for its products. 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