Sonic: Marketing Plan - Case Study Example

Marketing entry strategy is defined as an internally consistent set of goals and policies, which aligns the firm’s strengths and weaknesses with the external (industry) opportunities and threats (Teo, 2002). As a new entrant to the PDA field, our biggest weakness is lack of brand awareness as Hoek, Kearns & Wilkinson (2003) cite new smaller brands perform poorly in comparison to larger brands on loyalty measures. Sonic intends to combat this through the right marketing strategies and promotional measures for the specific target user group identified.

Multifunctional product – Sonic 1000 has the most functions among the PDA’s in its category. The voice recognition feature which enables the user to use the hand's free operations of the PDA is a feature that is not included in other PDA’s in the same category.Compatible OS - Sonic uses the Palm OS which is shareware and there are hundreds of applications that are written for functioning in this OS. Due to its compatible-based strategy, Palm OS has an open policy in which user interfaces can be dramatically changed and new hardware functions added freely, with a notably high degree of scalability.

Palm OS is more compact in nature as it requires only 2.4 MB RM against 16 MB required by Windows CE (Kurimoto & Koboyashi, n.d.). Palm is definitely better than rival PDA standards.Low Price – The product is priced low for entry into the student and other academic markets. Targeting the student community would help us avoid retaliation from powerful incumbents simply because of our product differentiation and low pricing strategy.Sturdy Design – Sonic 1000 has a sturdy design and can sustain some rough handling and usage.

 New Brand - There is no history for users to check the performance of the PDA. It will be an uphill task to develop brand awareness among users as we would have to compete against established players in the market. Besides, competition comes not just from the PDA players but from the mobile phone manufacturers as well as there is the convergence of functions between the two (Teo, 2002).