Buyer And Consumer Behavior - Case Study Example

BUYЕR АND СОNSUMЕR BЕHАVIОUR Name Course Lecturer Date Executive Summary Marketing decisions are very important and they play a significant role in determining the extent to which an organisation penetrates the market. Before making decisions concerning market category or segment, it is important to have full information and data concerning the market segment. The information includes the competitor activities and marketing methods, market attributes and trends in the market. This information helps to make the right decision and to apply the right strategies to the right market. In addition, the performance of an organisation’s own brand in the market is crucial in determining the market strategies to implement ion different market segments. This is further supported by brand awareness and salience in the market. These three aspects of brand help in making marketing decisions. This report analyses the performance of Weet-Bix brand in different market segments. This brand has good performance in different market segments, however, it is facing stiff competition from other established brands especially the corn flakes brand. The performance is above average in all the segments. It is necessary for the marketing manager of Weet-Bix brand to put in place the right marketing strategies in order to elevate this brand higher in the market. It has not been abler to penetrate some segments effectively and this is a good starting point. Brand Performance Weet-Bix has the second best performance in the market. It has 25% of the market share although it is facing stiff competition from Corn Flakes brand which has a market share of 34%. The brands are arranged in order of their performance in each market segment. Corn Flakes is leading in all the market segments while Weet-Bix is second, the other brands follow. Weet-Bix needs to increase its market penetration as it has not been able to penetrate in all markets effectively as the data indicates. Weet-Bix main competitor is corn flakes brand, this brand commands very high market penetration. It has 72% while Weet-Bix has 52% market penetration, corn flakes has been able to penetrate the various markets effectively than Weet-Bix. The data indicates that 67% of Weet-Bix customers also purchased corn flakes brand while 71% of corn flake customers also purchased Weet-Bix brand. This is an indication that Weet-Bix has more loyal customers than corn flakes. The average percentage of corn flakes who also bought other brands is higher than for Weet-Bix, this cements customer retention and brand loyalty assertiveness s of Weet-Bix brand. Also, it has an interpretation that customers prefer Weet-Bix brand more thancorn flakes brand. The cereal market is very competitive especially between Weet-Bix and corn flakes. Both brands have above average market penetration (Lee & Carter, 2011). Duplication of Purchase Law is apragmatic generalization; it uses repeat purchase patterns to identify competitive structure of a market (Keller et al., 2011). It provides that levels of penetration moderate amount of sharing among competing brands. The aberrations that occur attribute levels compete more or less than expected are known as termed partitions. This law provides a mechanism to look at patterns based on consumer purchase instead of patterns based on the market. Many of brands consumers are multi brand buyers (they buy a range of brands that are within their repertoires). The other brands also buy are in the aggregate thereby indicating similarity from brand to brand as De Chernatony (2010) asserts. Therefore, duplication of purchase law appears to assert that brands share their customers with other brands in line with the penetration of each brand. Generally, this law means that consumer goods markets lack specific partitions that uniquely appeal to a specific category of customers (Srivastava & Thomas 2010). There is deviation from expectations in that Weet-Bix is not the leading brand in the market. There were strong and effective marketing strategies implemented in the market and therefore it was expected that Weet-Bix will have the leading position. Although in second place, it was expected to be the leading brand. The possible reason for deviation is lack of positioning of the brand. Another reason is more effective marketing strategies by the competitor (Homburg et al., 2010). The two implications of purchase law in the table for any marketing manager are sharing of consumers and share of the market. Awareness and Salience This is the level of activation or prominence of brand in memory or mind. This refers to the ease of accessibility of a certain brand in the memory of the consumer. Brand salience is also defined as the degree to which a brand is noticed orthought about when customers are in buying situations. It takes place only when the customers are ion buying situations. Building a brand salienceis very important for any company, this is because it helps customers to identify key product features and hence influence their decision to buy (Lakshmi 2011). An organisation spend more time researching brand prospects, getting through to the decision makers or the customers, building relations as well as maintaining quality customer service (quality customer service significantly influences the customers decision to purchase a product even when they did not intend to purchase). Brand salience is more critical at these key decision points. Quality and quantity contribute to brand salience. In purchasingconditions, customers are driven by mental cues that activate their thoughts about brand consideration attributes. As such, customers build more memory structures about a brand and therefore the more likely it is to be thought of during buying decisions (quantity). For quality, the buying behaviours and factors surrounding a brand as well as solid research to back the factors and buying behaviours (Smith 2011). Brand salience is different from attitude in that Brand salience takes place in buying situations only while attitude is how consumers regards a brand even before they are in buying situations, it comes to mind, when customers are asked to recall brand within a certain category. There are various advantages of measuring brand salience; one of the advantages is that it influences customers buying decisions. While consumers may not have planned to purchase a certain brand or a product from a certain brand, brand salience influences them and they purchase the brand (Foxall et al., 2011). Moreover, it helps a company to enjoy greater brand loyalty and therefore less vulnerable to competitive marketing activities. It also helps companies to command larger margins in the market as well as have more inelastic responses to increase in prices as well as elastic responses to decrease in prices. Brand salience supports brand extensions, yields licensing opportunities and bridges between the past activities and the future direction. Brand salience helps an organisation to increase its marketing communication effectiveness and therefore it is able to reach more customers in different market segments (Vieceli & Shaw 2010). On the other side, it is important for an organisation to build brand salience. First, it helps companies to build their corporate image and directs on how to build the corporate image as well. In addition, it helps companies to position their brands by identifying their best attributes. Brand salience is systematically and consistently related to future customer retention and customer loyalty, it helps in customer retention and turning one buy customers to loyal customers and therefore very important brand salience. These factors indicate the importance of building brand salience by an organisation. There is a consistency in the salience matrix; another pattern is high performance in the overall brand performance outweighing top of mind awareness. Weet-Bix performs as expected within the whole sample because reaches the targets. However, it does not perform as expected in the customer base because there is a great variance top of mind awareness. The leading product in top of mind awareness provides a stiff competition for Weet-Bix; this indicates that the salience does not play its role in helping the brand to be less vulnerable to competitive marketing activities. The brand is exposed to competitive marketing actions by the competitors.Assuch, it does not perform as expected within its customer base. The salience results will help Weet-Bix to implement new marketing strategies in relation to the market competition. The marketing strategies have to be realigned and be formulated again so as to reflect the market competition. To build and enhance brand salience, a firm must a brand one of the first brands to be recalled by the consumers in search of internal and long term memory. The cues to be included in to a Weet-Bix advertisement are call returns in two hour interval, same day service, day and night customer help, device and service installation, end user training, warranty, after sales service, quality and compatibility (Lam et al., 2010). Demographics &Segmentation The customer profile of Weet-Bix is different to that of the competition. The data indicates that the brand has been able to forge an average performance without much fluctuation in relationship status. It indicates that it is most preferred by couple but very poor performance by single. This corresponds well with the gender where by the product is the most preferred by female. Therefore, female play a major role in the consumption of this product by couple. In addition, the data on total household income indicate that the product is the most preferred by consumers in the “more than $70,000 segment”. This indicates that it has concentrated efforts in this segment. The other products do not indicate such relation and therefore the consumer profile of Weet-Bix is different to that of the competition (Christopher et al., 2013). In term of marketing strategies, the highest consumers of Weet-Bix are female. They even influence men in consuming this product as the data indicate the second highest consumers of this product are couple. Weet-Bix has been able to strategically take control of the female and couple market segments as such; this will help Weet-Bix to concentrate its efforts in the male, single and divorced market segments. It will formulate unique marketing strategies for reaching out these market segments. The segmentation results will help Weet-Bix to put in place marketing strategies to raise the product awareness and salience in the segments that it is performing poorly. The household income will help it to focus the marketing strategies on the $50,000 - $70,000 market segment; it has the lowest performance in this segment and therefore it will concentrate on improving its performance by implementing special strategies to counter the competition. It is important that Weet-Bix perform well in this market as it valuable and contains well informed and loyal customers (Finisterra et al., 2010). 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