Marketing Cases Analysis - Essay Example

It would otherwise be exhibited within extra personnel costs and wasted food that goes uneaten. Moreover, by establishing a headquarters that specializes in seeking to gauge consumer demand and key market trends and shifts, the ability of the franchises to anticipate and respond to key market forces is exponentially greater than that of its closest competitors.

With regards to whether Darden has differentiated and positioned its brands effectively, this is something of a two-part response. Firstly, the level of overall success that the firm has experienced since it has transitioned Olive Garden, Long Horn Steakhouse, and Red Lobster from the prior ineffective models to what is seen today, the reader can rapidly see that the firm has expertly positioned these components to reap a vastly increased size of revenue. However, to say that these efforts have perfectly positioned the brands effectively would be to state that no further work is necessary. As a basic unit of understanding, although the firm has experienced a high level of success, there always remains a certain level of improvements that can further integrate the chains with the needs exhibited by a rapidly shifting climate of needs and desires among the consumer.

Standardization is a powerful tool whereby a firm can seek to provide a level of expected service or goods to its customer across the range of its many market representations.  However, although such a practice helps to simplify the consumer choices that might be acted upon, it portends the necessary danger of providing too high a level of standardization so much so that little if any differential is realized by the consumer about whether one alternative is necessarily better than another. In this way, such a level of standardization can ultimately hurt the firm.

With regards to whether or not the success of the Darden firm will continue to be realized, this is a question that a firm understanding cannot be integrated with unless the researcher knows key information concerning how the demand differentials will be realized within the market within the coming years. As was noted in the study, key changes have already been experienced by restaurants about the overall level of money that patrons are willing to expend on eating out as well as the fact that market saturation has occurred in recent years about the total number of restaurants existing within the system.

With regards to the recommendations that I would make to continue Darden’s future growth, these would necessarily be consistent upon continuing to seek to gauge consumer taste and changing demands. Though the firm has done an exemplary job of this already, resting on one’s laurels and believing that few levels of additional market change will be exhibited will necessarily be a failing strategy. As a function of this, it is important to continually change offerings and stances to seek to engage the changing influence that consumer tastes affect on demand.

With regards to the total number of consumers that Netflix can afford to lose before its profitability is called into question, a simple analytical analysis of the numbers corresponding to the price increase denotes that the firm can “afford” to lose around 8 million customers before the aftershocks of such a move damaging the bottom line of the firm. However, it is important to note that the price increase was not only integrated out of a sense of greed; rather the movie industry and its parts had made intimations about the fact that a large contractual price increase was necessary to continue such services as Netflix was interested in engaging with. As a function of this, the firm anticipated these actions by raising prices drastically to offset such a later price increase.

With regards to this being a smart move for the firm, opinion is rather divided on this issue.  What the reader can infer is that from the intelligence that the firm had about how prices were likely to change about its existing agreements with the production industries, one can say definitively that it was a good business decision because the firm realized that the market was changing and it was necessary to integrate price changes to anticipate and defray these. However, about how the firm sought to engage these price changes, it can be said that this left much to be desired. Ultimately, what provided to be so detrimental to Netflix was the fact that little explanation was given to the consumer via press release or direct marketing with regards to why the prices had doubled for seemingly no reason at all. This equated to a horrific blunder in consumer confidence and trust as many individuals came to understand that the firm had overestimated the loyalty of its customers and was seeking to maximize its profits at their expense. A far better way of engaging such a change would have been to seek to create a level of understanding within the consumer as to the underlying motives and reasons; thereby leaving little if any room for the shareholder to believe that such an action was precipitated based upon greed and/or avarice alone. Read More