Specific Marketing Strategies - Australias Salmon Market - Case Study Example

Strategies & Implementation Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Course Name Date of Submission Strategies & Implementation Marketing Goals and Objectives Marketing Goal To maintain a lead in the Australia’s salmon market, as well as maximize the value for its shareholders. Marketing Objectives To increase the per capita consumption of salmon in Australia to drives sales growth Increases sales growth by 30% in the next one year Increase brand awareness in Australian market and encourage more people to substitute salmon for protein Achieve a ROA of 15% Achieve high return on investment for its shareholders Increase distribution outlets in Australian market. Specific Marketing Strategies Target Market The success of any marketing strategy depends on how well a company defines its target market and provides products and services that meets the needs of the customers in that market segment. Tassal’s customers are divided into different market segments that have varying needs and characteristics. Demographic Demographically, Tassal targets customers of all ages, including the young, the old, the rich and the poor (Undercurrent News 2014). These target market consist of people who care about what they buy in terms of quality and price. Geographical Geographically, Tassal for many years have targeted mainly the Australian market because of the high demand for salmon among Australian consumers. However, the company is currently focusing its efforts in reaching the Asian consumers who are increasingly demanding for proteins. Psychographic Tassal targets customers who are conscious about their health (Undercurrent News 2014). Health conscious customers consist of those who value their health and buy only food that they believe are healthy and might not affect them health wise upon consumption. Tassal targets these health conscious customers by advertising its salmon as a healthy meal reach in lean protein. Marketing Mix Tassal has specific marketing goals and objectives that it intends to achieve to ensure competitiveness (Wilson and Gilligan 2012, p. 102). However, in order for Tassal to achieve the marketing goals and objectives, it must ensure the adoption of effective marketing strategies, particularly with regards to the marketing mix. Marketing mix denotes products, prices, place and promotional strategies that a firm adopts to help it achieve its objectives. Product Product is one of the most critical marketing elements that a company must consider in its bid to achieve its objectives. Products are the goods or services that a company offers to its customers. The main marketing goal of Tassal is to maintain a lead in the Australian salmon market and to maximize shareholders’ value (Undercurrent News 2014). To achieve this goal, Tassal must ensure that the products it offers to its customers are of high quality to attract customers to buy the company’s products. Accordingly, here is how the product element of the marketing mix will be arranged to ensure that Tassal achieves is marketing goals and objectives. Tassal will provide high quality salmon by ensuring that salmon served to customers are fresh. Because the tastes of customers differ from one customer to another, the company will ensure the provision of a variety of salmons, including smoked, fried, stewed and fresh for customers. This is important because it will give Tassal’s diverse customers choices, thereby resulting in customer satisfaction, which in turn will result in increased sales, profits and high shareholder value in the end. Price Price is the other critical element of the marketing mix that must be assigned to a product with a critical thought to help a company achieve its objectives and goals (Bowman and Gatignon, 2010, p. 42). Tassal has over the years been trying to ensure that it charges competitive prices to help attract customers. However, as the competition in the salmon market increases in Australian market, Tassal must change its pricing strategies to ensure the achievement of its marketing goals and objectives. Therefore, to enable Tassal achieve its objectives and goals, the prices will be made affordable to all Tassal customers in Australia. Charging affordable prices for products and services will make Tassal attractive to price sensitive customers that form the majority of Australian population. Accordingly, this will help Tassal achieve its objective of increasing market share and sales volume, thereby resulting in increased profitability and high return on shareholder wealth. Place Place is another critical marketing mix element that determine whether or not a company can be successful in a market where it operates. Place defines how a company distributes its products to customers (Wilson and Gilligan 2012, p. 106). To ensure that customers get Tassal products easily, the company normally distribute its salmons through retain and wholesale outlets, such as Coles and Woolworth (Fitzgerald 2013). However, in order for Tassal to achieve its growth targets, the company will have to open up its stores in all the major towns and cities across the country instead of relying on wholesale and retail outlets alone. Promotion Promotion defines the strategies that a company uses to create product awareness and persuade customers to buy company products or services (Bowman and Gatignon, 2010, p. 44). Tassal has been using a variety of promotional strategies to create product awareness, including radio, television and magazines. However, in order for Tassal to achieve its set objectives and goals, Tassal must consider taking advantage of the new communication tools. In particular, Tassal must design its promotional strategy to include the use of social media, which has become a popular communication tool for reaching customers across the globe. The main advantage of social media promotion to Tassal is that it helps a company reach a wide audience cheaply (Fitzgerald 2013). Accordingly, this will enable Tassal increase its brand awareness beyond the Australian market easily. Additionally, Tassal will also have to use good public relations in the way it handle customers as this will make the company attractive to customers, thereby resulting in increased customers and sales growth. Ways in Which Tassal Can Match Its Strengths to Opportunities to Create Capabilities in Serving the Needs of Customers As noted in the SWOT framework, Tassal has a number of strengths that it can use to take advantage of the opportunities available in the market. One of the key strength of Tassal, according to the SWOT framework is strong brand awareness and reputation. Tassal can take advantage of this strength to increase its market share in the growing Australian salmon market and in the Asian region (Undercurrent News 2014). This is because Tassal will find it easy convincing customers in the new markets to buy its salmons based on its strong brand awareness and reputation. Tassal can also take advantage of its effective management style and leadership to take advantage of the expansion opportunities provided by acquisitions. According to the SWOT framework, it become apparent that Tassal stands a chance to expand its market reach beyond the Australian market by acquiring troubled companies in the industry, where it operates. To exploit this opportunity, the company should use effective management and leadership provided by Mark Ryan to enable it expands its market reach into the Asian market that provides a huge market opportunity for salmon (Fitzgerald 2013). Strategies That Tassal Can Adopt To Help Minimize Its Threats and Weaknesses As described in the SWOT framework, Tassal has a number of weaknesses and threats that might have serious negative impact on the business if not addressed. The first major weakness of the company has to do with the fact that Tassal has concentrated too much on the domestic market (Undercurrent News 2014). This is not withstanding the fact that the company has numerous business opportunities in the international market, where the demand for protein from salmon has been growing. Therefore, Tassal can minimize this weakness by expanding into the international markets, particularly in Asia, where the demand for protein has been growing. For this reason, Tassal should consider expanding business into emerging Asian economies, such as China, India, Singapore and Indonesia as this will offer the firm a huge opportunity for growth. The other major weakness of Tassal has to do with high employee turnover (Fitzgerald 2013). Despite the growth that Tassal has recorded over the years, the leading Australian salmon provider is experiencing high employee turnover that is triggered by poor pay, poor working condition, and lack of motivation among employees. High employee turnover is affecting the company negatively as it result in high cost of recruitment and training of new employees, as well as portraying a bad image of the company (Undercurrent News 2014). Fortunately, there are a number of things that Tassal can do to minimize this weakness and convert it into opportunity. Firstly, Tassal can minimize this weakness by using the high profits it generates from its operations to ensure that employees are properly paid and provided with benefits to increase job satisfaction. Secondly, the company can address the issue of high employee turnover by improving the working condition of its workers, as well as ensuring that employees are highly motivated to do their jobs. Addressing employee issues and keeping them highly satisfied will be beneficial to Tassal because highly motivated workforce will result in high productivity and better products and services, which in turn result in high customer satisfaction. Apart from the weaknesses, the survival of Tassal is also under threat from high competition. Currently, Tassal faces stiff competition from both local and international companies, some of which export cheap salmon to the Australian market. Nevertheless, there are a number of things that Tassal can do to minimize the threat of competition (Fitzgerald 2013). Firstly, the company can minimize competition by acquiring struggling companies, or merging with good performing companies. Secondly, Tassal can minimize competition by expanding its business beyond Australian market. Thirdly, the company can minimize the threat of competition by offering its salmons at affordable prices to drive competitors away from the market. Marketing Implementation & Control Implementation Because of the high competition in the salmon market, Tassal will not be able to achieve its stated goal of maintaining a lead in the Australian salmon market, as well as maximizing shareholder wealth easily (Undercurrent News 2014). Therefore, to achieve the stated goal, a number of marketing management processes will be followed. The first step will involve evaluating the marketing opportunities available for Tassal salmon products. In this respect, the marketing manager will be involved in conducting a marketing research to determine the long-run opportunities that are available in the market. This will be conducted with the help of marketing information system (IS). Using information system in conducting marketing research will help in gathering critical information about the customers, competitor and changes in business environment to determine the opportunities available. Once the opportunities available for Tassal products have been identified, the next step will be to define the target market. Because of the competitive nature of the business environment, where Tassal operates, defining the target market is critical as it will enable the company know the customers it is serving and their needs. Accordingly, the company will be able to develop products that satisfy their needs, thereby leading to competitiveness. Market segmentation will be done by marketing managers with the help of marketing experts. The third step will involve marketing mix development. Marketing mix refers to the marketing variables that a company puts together to generate the response that it needs in the target market (Bowman and Gatignon, 2010, p. 56). The marketing mix developed will include coming up with the product with the right features, and qualities that meets the needs of customers. This will be based on the marketing research findings about the needs of customers. Similarly, the marketing team will set competitive prices that leave the company with profit margin. Additionally, the marketing manager with his team will come up with appropriate distribution channels. Finally, the marketing department will launch appropriate marketing campaign to create brand awareness and persuade target customers to buy the company products. Evaluation & Control In order to determine is the marketing activities are achieving the goals set or not, the marketing team will conduct an evaluation and control of the marketing activities (Ferrell and Hartline 2012, p. 66). To ensure effective implementation of the stated goal of Tassal, certain control measures will be undertaken by the marketing department. Firstly, the marketing team will ensure that funds are availed to ensure effective implementation of the marketing efforts. Secondly, the marketing team will ensure that the best talents are hired and trained to ensure effective implementation of the marketing efforts so as to ensure the achievement of the organizational goal. Additionally, because the commitment level of the management has a huge influence on the success of the marketing efforts, the management will be encouraged to show total commitment to the marketing plan by getting involved in the marketing activities. Further, the company-wide orientation to customers will be encouraged to ensure effective implementation of the marketing efforts. Output controls will also be performed to ensure the implementation of the organizational goal. The input controls will include product performance control, price performance control, distribution and promotion controls (Ferrell and Hartline 2012, p. 72). However, in case any of these marketing mix elements are not performing to standard, appropriate corrective actions will be taken by the marketing team, including enhancing product quality, lowering prices to make the product competitive and affordable, increasing distribution channels and investing more in promotional activities. Marketing Audits Marketing audit involves monitoring the marketing activities to see if they are achieving the goals and objectives set by a company (Bowman and Gatignon, 2010, p. 67). In evaluating the effectiveness of the marketing activities to ensure effective implementation, the marketing team will conduct a sales analysis to determine if the marketing activities are achieving the sales target set by the company. Sales analysis will involve comparing the actual sales achieved and the sales target set by the company and accounting for any discrepancy discovered. Secondly, the performance of the marketing activities will be evaluated by conducting market-share analysis. This involves comparing the sales achieved in the Australian market by those of the competitors (Ferrell and Hartline 2012, p. 76). Conducting a market-share analysis is critical because it will tell the company how it is performing against its competitors. If the company’s market share happens to be larger than competitors, this would imply that the marketing activities are achieving the set goals. References Bowman, D., & Gatignon, H 2010, Market response and marketing mix models: trends and research opportunities. Now Publishers Inc, London. Ferrell, O. C., & Hartline, M 2012, Marketing strategy. Cengage Learning, Mason, OH. Fitzgerald, M 2013, Successful strategies for sustainable salmon, viewed 23 September 2015 http://www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au/news/successful-strategies-for-sustainable-salmon Undercurrent News 2014, Marketing key for Tassal as hot summer keeps sales flat, viewed 23 September 2015 http://www.undercurrentnews.com/2014/11/05/marketing-key-for-tassal-as-hot-summer-keeps-sales-flat/ Wilson, R. M. S., & Gilligan, C 2012, Strategic marketing management. Routledge, London. Read More