E-Commerce Retailer Marketing Strategies for Nature's Candy Organization - Case Study Example

Name College Course Date E-commerce Retailer Marketing Plan for Nature's Candy organization Situation Analysis The situation analysis provides the first step of developing Nature's Candy’s e-commerce plan. Given that Nature’s Candy is in its initial stage of operation, activities of marketing are crucial to its business profitability and success. This study analyses the current situation of the company using SWOT analysis method. Nature’s Candy organization gives a wide range of private label homeopathic and naturopathic nutritional supplements. The essential market requirement is to have a large selection of practically consistent-quality and priced supplements. Nature's Candy is an organization located in Chicago and is designed to be the best e-commerce company in Web-based retailing of homeopathic and naturopathic nutritional supplements. Even though many IT companies have failed recently, the Internet still supports and maintains e-commerce sales. Inaccessibility to capital, lack of revenue streams and unproven selling model, were the major causes of the failure. Nature's Candy is set to overcome those problems using a competent distribution system and an accessible website. Nature's Candy's will present finer Internet-based natural supplements that lower the cost of the consumers. The company attracts as well as maintains existing customers. This organization is giving priority to a business model that has an established revenue-generation ways than focusing on market share and mere customers. Nature's Candy revenue is expected to grow to $319,000 in three years to come. The IT investment of Nature’s Candy marketing is on creation of customers’ database for sold and available nutritional supplements. Objectives The objectives of Nature’s Candy are divided into two: financial and marketing. Marketing objectives include reducing the acquisition costs of customer by eight percent per annum, raising the number of repeat customers on quarterly basis by 7 percent, and maintaining a monthly steady and positive growth. The financial objectives comprise of reducing variable costs by two percent per annum, increasing pro-forma profits by the third year, and maintain profits on ninety nine of the items listed. Controls The controls of developing marketing plan of Nature's Candy are to guide this organization. The following control areas will be followed to gauge the ongoing performance. The acquisition costs of the customers, the level of customer satisfaction, and the number of repeat customers. Implementation of the marketing plan will involve following various milestones to identify the main marketing programs. This entails ensuring contingency planning for both difficulties and worst case risks. Whereas risks and difficulties include issues of software/hardware hampering placement along with fulfillment of order, problems producing visibility, and an immature market that does not adopt the convenience and efficiencies offered by Internet-based dealers, worst case risks consist of the need for liquidate equipments for covering up liabilities and problems of securing supplementary capital. The promotional campaign that will be utilized in Nature's Candy will comprise of various approaches of distribution, pricing, advertising, customer service and promotion. The pricing campaign will to some extent undercut the general brands. Nature’s Candy will be able to perform this pricing structure by controlling its resourceful business model and making use of private label manufacturing. Distribution of all products to be sold will be carried out through the main warehouse, accessed through the website and delivered locally in this nation and also on international market. Promotion and advertising will be ensured via use of outdoor advertisement and internet-based marketing. Customer Service will be carried out through benchmarked industry models; Amazon.com and L.L. Bean. Actions Actions of Nature's Candy will consist of collecting information concerning the prized customers’ common attributes. The gathered information will be utilized in determining the specific customers’ requirements and the best communication methods with the targeted sectors. Actions will be focused on redefined marketplace of the Internet. The users of the products will be Baby Boomers that represent about fifty percent of the unrestricted income in the U.S. These users search for non-invasive, proactive and non-pharmaceutical methods of staying healthy with impending age. Nature's Candy Company will bring cutting-edge and convenient products and service to these people. The long-range actions of Nature's Candy will dominate the market of homeopathic and naturopathic supplements and icon brand creation. At first, the company will engage in marketing through the web in the next one year to generate company awareness as well as the awareness of the product information. Since web-based advertising declined in the previous quarters, advertising prices have appreciably dropped too, making the overall expenditure a little bit cost effective. Additionally, actions of taking on outdoor advertisement like putting advertisement posters on public street walls will provide public awareness and direct more people to the website of the company. Tactics The company will use many tactics in order to position Nature’s Candy as the leading retailer of nutritional supplements. The tactics will incur losses associated with creation of customer awareness about the offered products, increasing the customer base, and building of referrals and loyalty of customers (Chaston 2).  Nature's Candy will place itself as a high-quality one-stop website with sensibly-priced supplements.  The competitive edge of Nature's Candy will be accessible website and finer customer service. The design of the website will give a competitive advantage as research shows that an accessible website notably increases sales. Complex websites which are not intuitive to users leads to loss of sales. The other tactic of Nature's Candy is its customer service that is so superior.  The department of customer service will serve all the needs of customers. All calls from customers regarding any issue will be given enough personal attention they deserve. Customers’ problems will be resolved quickly and their service improved significantly. A major trend abroad and in United States of America is characterized with more people are becoming proactive about their health. This makes Nature’s Candy to face completion from health clubs for their service/products. This is witnessed by the rise in the numbers of health clubs. Even memberships to those health clubs is increasing. Most people want to avoid invasive surgery and prevailing pharmaceuticals. Those people actively want to maintain their body health even through use of preventive medicine. Nature’s Candy employs business model of promotion and advertisement of their nutritional supplements in order to beat their competitors. The company educates that Naturopathic medicine actively promotes the treatment, diagnosis and prevention of human problems via the use of non-pharmaceutical practices and non-invasive products. Besides the overall improvement in naturopathic medicine, the American population is aging at a high rate increasing the use of homeopathic and naturopathic nutritional supplements. The Baby Boomers are believed to generate other income streams. This is because Baby Boomers are getting to their middle age hence focusing more on their mortality. This segment of demography encompasses eighty million people, representing above fifty percent of United States of America's discretionary income. It is rational to consider that such a wealthy market sector will continue to increase the naturopathic products’ sales. E-marketing method used by Nature’s Candy Company is web-based advertisement. The reason why internet-based promotion is used is because e-commerce has emerged and popularized throughout the world. Currently, web-based retailers are able to provide information on customer service, superior products. Similarly, customers can buy intangible and emotional services by use of e-commerce. E-commerce sellers have an added advantage where web-based retailers are not affected by the friction of local marketing and growing numbers of stores. Besides, e-commerce organizations do not incur excessive overheads that were experienced by ancient brick and mortar sellers. Judging from the recent triumph of Gap.com and Amazon.com, consumers and customers are contented with online buying and can actually pay for any convenience. Experts forecasted that by 2003, internet sales were likely to rise to $12 billion. According to Milutinović and Patricelli (2002), the previous Internet crash was caused by easy capital access that had been invested into other dotcoms and web retailers without realistic revenue models and business plans. Despite the consequences of the recent crash, the Internet is still a well organized distribution and marketing model, which when correctly used, extensively decreases costs associated with consumer services. Nature’s Candy Company carried out a number of focus groups to collect useful market research before undertaking this big project of developing marketing plan. The participants of focus groups were made up of dissimilar persons. While majority of the participating individuals were the targeted users, other participants were people that might have had a proclivity of purchasing nutritional supplement products from physical market or had an inclination of buying from a vendor on the Internet. The information by focus groups collected from different natural customers and tentative consumers was very invaluable. Working on one project for a elongated period of time was so hard that it was a lot difficult that perceiving different things from many perspectives was also cumbersome. The final research had a profound and positive effect on the whole project. It is even considered that Nature’s Candy Company will be extremely successful due to this e-marketing research (Zimmerman 420). Works Cited Chaston, Ian. “E-Marketing Strategy”, London: McGraw Hill, 2002. Milutinović, Veljko and Patricelli, Frédéric. E-Business and E-Challenges. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2002. Zimmerman, Jan. Web Marketing For Dummies. New York: For Dummies, 2011. Read More