Producing a Marketing Plan for Tesco - Essay Example

?Marketing Management Exam Q Produce a 2 Year Marketing Plan for a Company of Your Choice. Tesco PLC is one of the leading and UK’s strong core business entities operating in the global retail sector. A key strength of Tesco has been its ability to grow continually by offering greater value for the customers and keeping itself cheaper than its consumers. Another major strength of the company is its wide ranging product line that is able to attract a diverse range of customers, thus minimising it market risks. Moreover, Tesco’s customer centric marketing approach such as its loyalty card approach and club card tactics have been very famous among the customers, which has further rewarded the organisation with augmented customer morale and brand value. However, summed with faulty anticipation of the market trends and too much investment in a particular project to support its aggressive marketing strategies, Tesco also had to face significant challenges in securing the desired return on its investment along with affecting its market reputation to a considerable extent. Illustratively, it was because of the same reason that the launching of Tesco’s fresh and easy store failed in the US market recently. Marketing Plan for the First Year: One of the major problems that Tesco is facing is maintaining accuracy in anticipating the changing needs and wants of the customers. Therefore, in the first year, Tesco should build such product management strategies that could identify the tastes and preferences of the potential customers. Besides ensuring the quality while offering the products to its potential customers, Tesco shall also try to renovate the older products according to the tastes and preferences of the customers to augment their demand. Similarly, as a market leader and to make a stronger appeal to its customers, Tesco should note that in the modern world the customers are becoming increasingly quality driven. Therefore, Tesco should reassess its marketing processes concerning certain products in order to attract the customers’ loyalty at a greater degree. To be specific, Tesco should also be concerned regarding its product quality rather than entirely focusing on pricing at a cheaper rate than its competitors. Tesco must also pay due attention on enhancing its customer relationship model to sustain its competitive advantages at stake owing to the rising competition and the various ethical issues surrounding its regular functioning. Accordingly, to maintain transparency and enrich its customer recognition, the company should emphasise taking regular feedbacks from its various stakeholders including customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders. As expected, the feedbacks shall assist Tesco to balance its shareholder-centric objectives and its sustainability goals in a more competent manner and overcome the currently observed challenges. Marketing Plan for the Second Year: In the following year, Tesco should deliver due emphasis on storing and interpreting the feedbacks obtained from the stakeholders. This will certainly assist the company not only to develop a more objective oriented business functioning to reward a better market stance but will also enrich its product/service marketing strategies, contributing to a more competitive advantage to the company. It will be noteworthy for the company to ensure that the feedbacks obtained from the customers and other group of stakeholders are not misinterpreted, which will further assure accuracy in its market anticipation. Likewise, the company can develop different strategies to suffice the market trends and demands in different places. It is very much essential in this context that Tesco aims at taking a competitive advantage of its brand name and keep focusing on its transparency obligations as well as better customer focus in its marketing operations. Besides, in the second year of application of this marketing plan, the company needs to take an assessment of the strategic application effectiveness. Accordingly, Tesco must also shift from its price concerned and shareholder value centric marketing approach as it has been a fundamental cause for the company’s non-competencies and ethical challenges in the recent past. Rather, Tesco must reframe its marketing approach in a more sustainable manner concentrating on quality of its products and their ethical authenticity at large. Q.2. Using A Range Of Examples From Across Industries, Explore What Options Are Available To An Organisation For Creating And Sustaining A Competitive Advantage. The competitive advantage is often observed to be achieved when the profit level of the companies increase by a considerable extent, through the execution of various business strategies. In this similar concern, according to Porter, a firm is said to have a competitive advantage if it is able to create greater value for the customers. It would be vital to mention that business strategies should be adopted and implemented by the modern firms with the aim of attaining greater competitive advantages. In other words, any company is said to attain competitive advantages if the current business strategy is identified to be value creating and are not being implemented by its future competitors. While attaining the desired level of competency remains to be a noteworthy obstruction in marketing management of a company, sustaining its competitive advantages presents another challenge for companies in the current day context. As a matter of fact, the true competency that can be gained by a company shall only be through sustaining their competitive advantages and therefore, the strategic progress of the company should never be constricted to the attainment of the same. An in-depth assessment of the recent phenomenon may reveal various illustrations in order to justify the aforesaid notion. There are many companies who were able to achieve competitive advantages with the virtues of their innovative strategies. For example, Dell Inc has been able to gain competitive advantages by implementing and maintaining extremely efficient supply chain and distribution system, which is accounted among few best practices in record. Correspondingly, Dell has implemented knowledge management and sharing principles wherein the company has replaced its physical assets with the intellectual assets, aiding it in sustaining its acquired competitive advantages. It is with the same vision that for sustaining its competitive advantages Dell has adopted the most successful Japanese technique of Just-in Time (JIT) delivery, which operates on only six days of inventory, further reducing the company’s costs and enhancing customer satisfaction rewarding it with better brand recognition as well as customer loyalty. Similarly, Lenovo Group Limited acquired a considerable amount of competitive advantage focusing on its unique differentiation features in comparison to the large brands already operating in the global marketplace. Subsequently, to sustain its competitive advantages, Lenovo has been into partnership with IBM, a renowned software company, and thus, has been taking advantage of their brand name to market its ThinkPad notebook series. Besides, Lenovo has also been able to sustain its competitive advantages by focusing on continuous innovation and product betterment. Likewise, Cisco Systems, Inc has become famous for its new and innovative supply chain configuring activities that has rewarded the company with significant competitive advantages. Furthermore, Cisco has become famous for its new and innovative supply chain configuring activities. It is in this context that to sustain its competitive advantages, Cisco attempts to keep on deploying its converged, all-IP network. This convergence allows Cisco an infrastructure, which can make the organisation initiate new services for the business on a continuous basis, incurring minimum costs and rewarding better customer satisfaction. Therefore, from the above examples and discussion it can be affirmed that innovative strategies to grab customer attention, continuous market trend analysis to effectively align company approaches with customers’ needs and demands, contemporary and flexible business model developments, sustainable relations with the suppliers and distribution channel, widening of product line, knowledge management in the organisation and Total Quality Management like Just-in Time approach, are the few actions that can reward modern companies to achieve and sustain competitive advantages. Q.3. (a) Using Examples, Examine How Marketing Strategies Vary Through the Different Stages of a Product Life Cycle. Product Life Cycle (PLC) can be referred as a particular framework that is categorised into five main stages, viz. introduction, growth, maturity, saturation and decline. Introduction Stage: In the introduction stage, the marketing cost is generally high and the sales are low at this stage, wherein the company focuses more on the promotional and advertising activities to build an appeal to the customers as well as to generate a substantial degree of awareness amid the customers regarding the new product’s presence and benefits. For example, in the case of computer video games, launching of new games require more advertisements to ensure that the customers gain a better knowledge about the product. Growth Stage: In the growth stage of PLC, the demand for the product on offer is witnessed to be increasing gradually. As a result, costs incurred by the company to produce and distribute the product begin to fall whilst the sales revenue increases at this stage. Hence, at this stage, the profitability margin tends to rise with the increase in sales and thus, mark the most promising stage of the PLC framework. Taking the example of iPhones, it can be observed that with its growth in the market, its demand also increased substantially, which clearly contributes to the profitability margin of the major product brands. During this phase, the price of the products was on rise along with its demand in the targeted market segment. Maturity Stage: In the maturity stage, the sales begin to decrease and the product demand gradually becomes more stable in terms of its growth with rising effects of competition and the substitute product demands. Therefore, advertising becomes a major tool to regain the customers’ confidence. Illustratively, in the maturity phase of iPhones companies became much focussed on increasing the demand for the products, i.e. iPhones, in a much stable way. Accordingly, brands engaged with marketing iPhones can be observed as emphasising more on customer conveniences and preferences to sustain their competitive advantages during the maturity phase of the product. Saturation Stage: In this stage, the product begins losing the customers as the customers begin to move for the replacements. Therefore, the marketing strategies at this stage begin to reduce their product costs to make the pricing strategy more flexible. This stage identifies the downfall of the brand; therefore, the company should target new markets or the niche markets, which again implies that much stress is needed to be provided on the innovation and re-innovation of the product. It is worth mentioning in this context that iPhone companies have also focused on the same initiative. For example, the recent launch of Phablets has imposed a stirring effect on the industry structure, making iPhones again a consumer favourite product. Decline Stage: Advertisement efforts are likely to reduce at this stage and efforts are made to mop-up with the left products. Price and overall profit are also likely to fall. As the profit is running low in this stage, it can be enhanced and maintained by reducing the marketing and advertisement strategies. For example, typewriter can be considered as a suitable example in this context, which can be elaborated with reference to the fact that along with a rise in the demand for computers, the demand for typewriters declined steeply, ultimately leading to its abolition in the market, thus marking its decline stage. Q.3. (b) Using Examples, Demonstrate How Marketers Can Use The Concept Of The ‘Diffusion Of Innovation’ To More Effectively Market Their Products/Services, And How This Concept Is Related To The Product Life Cycle. According to a research and analysis, the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory is considered to be a moving target market approach. Once the target market prepared for the launch of the innovated new products, the firms select the early adopters and the innovators in the target market who will more likely to attract towards the product. Subsequently, when the product begins to gain acceptance, the product is said to get shifted to the ‘late majority phase’ of its life cycle, which focuses more on achieving the innovation taking advantage of the word of mouth publicity during its prior two stages. Later on this stage, advertising and media category targeted each new adapter category and as a result the diffusion process speeds up and eventually increases first time sales and earlier repeat purchases embarking the ‘Laggards’ phase of the life cycle. For example, if a company wants to advertise the latest smart phone with full technology, at the early stage of introduction or the ‘early adopters stage’, as per the Product Life Cycle (PLC) framework, the percentage of the people who attempts adopting the idea is quantified to be low. Therefore, more advertisements and publicity activities are required in this stage. Subsequently, in the next stage of PLC, i.e. in the ‘early majority stage’, the idea of using the smart phones begin to get popular and people are likely to adopt the new innovation and the idea. Additionally, in the ‘late majority stage’, the idea or the innovation can be observed to have reached to its saturation point, which indicates the maximum awareness of the product within the targeted market. In the ‘laggard stage’, correspondingly, the idea or the innovation becomes mature and begin to fall down from the saturation point owing to the fact that some new ideas or innovation tends to emerged in the market. Hence, it can be affirmed that DOI and PLC have a considerable similarity and are related to each other. Fig 1: Diffusion of Innovation Read More