Starbucks started in Seattle in 1970 as a gourmet coffee retailer, selling fresh ground coffee beans to local coffee lovers. Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz spotted an unfulfilled market need for cafes serving gourmet coffee directly to consumers. This proved to be a sound market penetration strategy and led to a large loyal consumer base. Read: Case Study of Starbucks: An Amazing Business Success Story Entrepreneurs in India discovered the romance of coffee at Starbucks and a few coffee chains, such as Barista, Cafe Coffee Day, and Qwiky’s have sprung up in metro cities. People of all age groups are extending enthusiastic welcome to this new entrant and drinking coffee like never before. Coffee lovers have always been lyrical about the virtues of this beverage — coffee inspires poetry and inflames prose; it is capable of firing passion, and stir people to romance, and drown a lover in dreams. The word Continue reading
Marketing Techniques
Managing Brand Equity – Stages and Issues
Consistency is the key to successfully building and managing brand equity. Having a long-term outlook and projecting a consistent image of your brand to the customer will maximize the results of building brand equity. It is critical for managers to realize that brand equity can have positive as well as negative effects on a product or company. In the end, it is the customer that truly defines what brand equity means. If management feels it is necessary to change the direction of a brand or change a product it must be careful not to change too quickly. There are many examples of companies that have changed a product or brand too much or too quickly. On these occasions, consumers met changes with adverse reactions. The most famous example is Coca-Cola. They changed the formula of their flagship product Coke, and consumers reacted so poorly to the new product that the Continue reading
Communication Effects of Advertising
The management should attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the advertising campaign if the firm’s advertising goals are to be achieved and the ad effectiveness is to be increased. By regular evaluation of the advertising effectiveness, the short comings and the plus points would be revealed and the management would be able to improve the campaign by negating the shortcomings and retaining the favorable point. For this purpose, it is very necessary to know how advertising affects the buyer’s behaviors. But this is very difficult task because measurements are imperfect and imprecise. The effectiveness of advertising can be measured by the extent, it to which it achieves the objectives set for it. If it succeeds in attaining the objectives. Advertising can be said to be effective otherwise it will be a waste of money and time. In this sense, advertising can be recognized as a business activity like other activities. Continue reading
Case Study: L’Oreal’s Promotional Strategies in Indian Cosmetics Market for Garnier
Garnier has been very active and upfront in adopting new promotional techniques to market its products. The company follows a very popular technique to advertise and market its products that is the Viral Marketing policy. Viral marketing is a term coined to define the productive ways a marketing message is made available. And corporate are using the medium to circulate brands and brand messages. The idea has caught on like a virus, as efficiently as Information Technology has entered households and businesses. Firms are now structuring their businesses in a way that allows them to grow like a virus and lock out the existing brick and mortar competitors through innovative pricing and exploitation of competitors’ distribution channels. The beauty of this marketing technique is that none of it requires any marketing. Customers, who have caught the virus, do the selling. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass Continue reading
The Importance of Brand Equity
“If the businesses were split up, I would take the brands, trademarks and goodwill, and you could have all the bricks and mortar – and I would fare better than you.” The optimism for the concept can be stated on the fact that when one would say as a predictor of future financial performance, brand equity, if reported, would be valuable for capital marketers and shareholders. Brand equity has the potential to become the set of measures of business performance that matter most. For example, Starbucks can sell its coffee at a higher price than solid market competitors because consumers associate the brand with quality and value. This is why brand equity is oftentimes directly correlated with a brand’s profitability. The motivation for brand equity comes from the observation that many marketing efforts “realize” benefits; such as sales or profit and these are accounted for in the firm’s profit and Continue reading
The Impact of E-Marketing on Businesses
The development of e-marketing has been one of the most important and influential trends in the field of business, marketing and Information Technology offer the past decade. It has revolutionized the manner in which certain businesses market their products and the advent of social media offers the potential to revolutionize the manner in which businesses and consumers interact in the future. E-marketing is a general term used to denote a wide array of different Internet-related activities. These include website building and promotion, consumer communications, e-mail marketing and newsgroup advertising. However, the term e-marketing has developed enormously over the past decade and today it encompasses a far wider range of activities and one of the most important of these is the use of social media in order to advertise online. So, e-marketing is the strategic process of creating, distributing, promoting and pricing products for targeted customers in the virtual environment of Continue reading