Overview of the Company

Fitme is a start-up business in the United States established in 2018. It has 35 physical stores in different regions of the US as well as digital platforms (that is website and mobile applications). It sells male clothing including popular fashion brands, designer clothes, accessories, and casual and formal wear. To enhance brand loyalty and create greater customer engagement Fitme has opened accounts on several social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked-in) (Hanlon 2021). The company has hired and formed a public relations management team who will be assigned to manage the posts, replies to the comments, to increase the reach of the profiles on these platforms. 

7ps of the market mix are: product, price, promotion, place, people, physical evidence, process. Fitme offers high-quality designer products at a reasonable price. Though some brands are costly as they are of high quality and designer clothes the company also offers low-priced good quality casual and formal wear. Fitme uses social media marketing, email marketing, mobile applications as well as SMS marketing for promotional activities. Fitme has a total of 985 employees including the staff at the physical store, storage, deliverymen, technical team, marketing team, and others. People from different regions, countries, different religions and races, speaking different languages work here. The products are available at two types of places: physical stores as well as these can be ordered on the website or using the mobile app and can be get delivered at the preferable place of the customers. The product of this company makes people look more confident and stylish which is a piece of physical evidence. The distribution process is as follows: the products of Fitme are collected from the suppliers, stored in different storage facilities, distributed to the physical stores, and get delivered to people’s doorsteps. 

The first page of this website contains a line ‘Dresses, that fits you perfectly’ along with pictures of well-dressed young men. The targeted market segment of this company is 20+ something men. The people with high style sense and requirements are targeted by providing a complete set of clothes and accessories (such as matching leather bags, wallet, watch, shoes, belt with shirts and pants) that is a part of Fitme’s exclusive collections.

Bonobos was originally founded by Andy Dunn and Brian Spaly in 2007 in the United States (US). However, in 2017 it was acquired by Walmart. This company has 62 stores across the country as well as a digital presence through the website bonobos.com. Bonobos mainly sell men’s clothing (Bonobos, 2022). Thus this is a direct competitor of Fitme. 

• Strengths: Bonobos offers a wide range of products, as the targeted market segment uses social media more actively the posts on the social media platforms are used to enhance customer engagement, the quality and design of the clothing it offers are popular among the customers (Bonobos, 2022). 
• Weaknesses: The fashion clothes are mainly luxury commodities and hence the high unemployment and low economic growth or income affects the sales negatively, the pandemic has affected the sales of the US fashion industry negatively (Smith 2022), as it offers fashion products that are always changing the company needs to spend a lot of money for upgrading the products according to the changing trends simultaneously.
• Opportunities: the pre-pandemic growth rate of the US fashion industry was high and the sales are increasing continuously over time which shows that the people are becoming more conscious regarding their style statement (Smith 2022),creating a digital presence is helping this company to reach out to people of different regions where the physical stores could not reach, innovation of cloud-based technology which helps to manage data.
• Threats: online purchases and cashless payment processes imply a greater chance of cybercrimes, the US fashion brand market is highly competitive, and changing fashion trends can pose threat to the company.

• As fashionable clothing is a luxury commodity, Fitme would have both high-priced fashionable clothes and low-priced clothes for regular use for both types of consumers. 
• To avoid the risks of cybercrime, the cyber security protocol would be strictly followed and a group of ethical hackers will be hired to realize the weaknesses in the system.
• To do extensive market survey and research to understand the changing pattern of the fashion trends in the society so that the company can change its collection of clothes accordingly and can avoid facing loss.  
• AI technology would be used to send personalized recommendations to the customers through mobile applications, email, and SMS to increase sales. 

Marketing Mix and Targeting

To measure the qualitative performance of the company the following indicators would be used: Customers reviews are recorded to assess the number of complaints and good reviews, defectiveness per 1000 units,  reworks per 1000 units, shipment on time, order to ship ratio. All these data are recorded with the help of cloud-based technology and digitized system and assessed annually to improve performance. Thus the essay concludes by revealing the digital marketing strategy of Fitme. 

Reference 

Bonobos, 2022. Bonobos. [online] Bonobos. Available at: <https://bonobos.com/> [Accessed 28 March 2022].

Hanlon, A. (2021). Digital marketing: strategic planning & integration. Sage.

Smith, P., 2022. Clothing store sales U.S. 1992-2020 | Statista. [online] Statista. Available at: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/197644/annual-clothing-store-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/> [Accessed 28 March 2022].

Budgeting is useful for planning and controlling spending, as well as bringing attention to and focusing on important issues or activities. This makes it easier to plan, perform, and monitor.

Traditional budgeting focuses on forecasting earnings, calculating costs, and anticipating profitability. In the case of an established firm, one may utilize the budget from the prior year and modify it for inflation and developments in their industry. Budgeting in the traditional sense serves no utility as it adds no value to the organization. Traditional budgeting may be an incorrect reflection of the company’s desired outcomes. Some managers and even entrepreneurs might tamper with predictions to make the outcomes appear more appealing.

It might be easy to determine, but it will not benefit the company in the long term. Conventional budget making involves less effort to design than a zero-based budget, yet it requires a while. That might use less time-consuming allowing a business manager needed time to manage the company. However, it is of minimal utility. Elements in modern professional situations are prone to change regularly.

As a result, “ABC Manufacturing firm” does not offer much value by utilizing traditional budgeting, and so is not appropriately using the budget process to prepare for coming year’s spending. 

The overall effectiveness of the budgeting process is contingent on senior management’s cooperation. If senior management does not support the project, it will collapse. To produce strong financial results, the organization’s employees must be dedicated to working in accordance with the company’s plans and budgetary commitments. Because it impacts and strengthens the staff’s dedication to engaging in the creation and implementation of the organization’s budget, leadership is critical in determining the organization’s overall performance. Supervision is essential to guarantee that financial commitments are met and that they do not depart from their set goals.

Competitors Analysis

Cutting budgets is not a smart idea because expenditures might fluctuate year over year due to uncontrolled external causes. Therefore, management should strive to boost productivity and reduce consumption variations. Although cost-cutting is a great step toward the firm’s long-term development and growth, it can create unfair or unjust expression among personnel as well as in the organization. Employees may misinterpret it as cost-cutting and raise a panic alert all through the organization. Budget cuts do not encourage employees since they are unable to meet the objective and receive the incentive. It will hurt the reputation of the company.

The cost reduction may be at the cost of the quality of the main product and it would affect negatively the long term vision and brand value of the company.

Instead of cost-cutting, the budget requires smart thinking of allocating funds to the appropriate area which would add value to the organization as well as make the process smooth. Budgets are mainly prepared to identify and address the areas so that business operations can be funded to satisfy the existing and expected requirements. 

The budgets are prepared to know the requirement of funds to support a program and what proportion of it needs to be allocated for the acquisition of substantial resources, to know overall return from the operations, and if there is a shortfall then finding the ways to solve the problem and checking the feasibility of the project.

Whenever a budget is being prepared to give some reality-based perception of what could be the approx. revenue and expenses in a particular operation based on some reality that requires some research. However, most of the time people inflate the budget to enhance the amount of funding needed or to exaggerate a part of the budget or maybe due to lack of knowledge and training.

Without knowing or in the absence of knowledge might not be a crime but it moves from the real purpose of the budget. However, knowingly inflating a budget is surely an ethical issue because such inflated budgets are presented to investors, and funds are sought from them this all would help to make an uninformed decision making and may lead to failure of project and wastage of funds.

Even if a reward or incentive is awarded to some staff or penalized based on inflated budgets this is wrong due to misleading information.

The staff generally commits these mistakes to care the chance of getting positive feedback or reward or to earn recognition in the company or to represent the problems bigger than they are to show their dedication. All of these efforts are unethical.

In the long run, it may mislead the company and damage its reputation by losing valuable customers and sincere employees due to improper recognition.

To solve this problem organizations create an ethical environment where unethical practices are penalized and there should be accountability-related policies framed by the entities. The sincere employees of related fields should be responsible for creating the budget where proper diligence and professionalism shall be enquired with by the superiors.

The company needs to provide adequate training for doing the research and fieldwork before recruiting those tasks and after allocation of the task, there is a need for evaluation of the performances of such employees.

The superiors and top-level staff may take care of these aspects by putting the same into the company policy and decision making.