Product Selection

Question:

Discuss about the Marketing Investments and Brand Equity.

The marketing activity of Houzit in Brisbane aims at capturing a 12% market share that will increase the company’s sale by 8.5%. Product Selection is one of the main marketing activities for a manufacturer or a service provider. The selection of the product greatly depends on the purchasing trends of the customers, market researches and sales experience of the products (Gbadamosi et al. 2013). Pricing is another aspect that analyzes the marketing activity of a company. The price of the product is analyzed comparing the price offered by its competitors and hence this reduce the risk factor of the product is reduced. Promotional Activities plays a major role in determining the marketing activity of an organization (Kotler et al. 2012).. In this case, the Houzit Company in Brisbane can utilize the home ware magazines for its promotional activities. The promotion for a product can increase the sale of the product and hence increase the profit of the organization.

The marketing plan of Houzit plans to increase its market growth in seasonal demand in the next six month. The product selection by the company affects greatly on the marketing integration of the company. The pricing of the product influences the sales of the company. The rise in price can decrease the sale for the company while a reasonable pricing can attracts customers for the company. Promotional activities of the company can increase the demand of the products for the company. A company can mainly invest in promoting of its products through chief media devices like the digital media (Nguyen 2014). The chief digital media at present comprises of online social networking platforms and the digital devices like internets, mobiles.

Monitoring of a product is mainly important for the future prospect of the organization. Monitoring of the product can increase or decrease the profits of the organization depending on these factors. There are also some factors like external factors, cost-benefits and feedback that monitors the progress of the product. If a case is considered where a cost increases sales by 20% and another by 5% then, obviously it is the 20% increase in the cost that will be taken by the company for its expensiveness (NWANKWO 2013). Feedback is an important aspect in monitoring the product of an organization. A positive feedback can increase the sales of the product while a negative feedback can deteriorate the sales of the company leading to the ruination of the organization (Van Heerde and Neslin 2017).

Pricing

Distribution and pricing play a crucial role in the business and marketing activity of the company. The distribution channel that the company follows is through its own physical stores that it owns in Brisbane. The company own about fifteen stores through which it carries out it selling process. The company also maintains a premium pricing strategy for all its products as their products are of good quality in the market (Davcik and Sharma 2015). The company can allow expansion of its physical stores in more areas of Brisbane and in Australia. It can plan for an international expansion through which it can distribute its product to more number of customers. Online website launch can be a good idea of distribution because market is easily approachable through these channels. In relation to pricing, the company can reduce the price for its new products and aim the mass market.

The progress of the company for the new marketing plan and objectives can be measured by the increase in sale of the product and revenue of the company after the proposed plan. Market expansion can be measured by analyzing the increase in number of physical stores and revenue from the online business (Rego et al. 2013). Mainly number of orders, revenues and number of stores is the key performance indicator for the business to judge its achievement of targets.

The staffing proposals of the company for distribution of responsibilities and the delegation of roles to the staffs will include marketing manager, a PR manager, an advertising manager, in store sales team and web designer. These are the most important staffs required by the business to carry out its marketing activities smoothly. Marketing manager will be responsible for monitoring the entire marketing activities and designed promotional methods. PR and advertising manager will look after the external market promotion and sales team will carry out indoor sales. Web designer will be helpful to design a unique web page for the online website of the company (Strauss 2016).

The strategies developed for the marketing of the product can be communicated to the staffs and other required personnel of the company through board meeting, staff meeting and press releases. These three will be the most effective method through which the company can share its plan to the staffs within the organization and delegate the responsibilities to the required people (Baker 2014).

The coaching and mentoring of the activities of the staffs is important for the business while carrying out a successful marketing plan. Some of the steps to mentor and coach the staff on its work is by delegating, offering performance feedback, carrying out a coaching meeting, offer words of wisdom to the staffs, set goals for the week, offer trainings and others. Some of the strategies by which the company can carry out for helping the staff carry out the planned strategies effectively are shown above (Garvey et al. 2017).

Promotional Activities

Resources that the company offers to the staff to carry out effective marketing strategy can be assessed by analyzing the level of usage of the resources and the level of target achieved. For example, the financials and funds offered by the company to the marketing personnel to carry out effective promotional activities can be assessed by analyzing the total fund spent and the percentage of target achieved according to the set goals. Thus the main resources that the company can analyze includes financials, number of marketing staffs, use of information tools and others.

Feedback is important for any organization to motivate the staffs and to mentoring them to offer better performance in case they lack in something. However, for the feedback purpose the company needs some model or tool in order to carry it out effectively. The model that would be appropriate for the feedback of the marketing staffs would include Feedback Sandwich. This model involves three important steps that would allow the company to offer feedback on both positive and negative performance of staffs and further recommendations. Such type of model reduces the bad effect of negative feedback on the staffs and encourages them to improve in whatever they are doing. Thus, it will help the company to reduce its employee turnover (Hardesty et al. 2014).

For analyzing the performance of the marketing staffs in meeting, the required objectives of marketing the company can carry out one on one session with the staffs delegated with responsibilities. This will help them to know the challenges they are facing while carrying out their task. Accordingly, the company can offer further training and session to the staff to improve in their weakness. Further, it can publish weekly report on the performance of every staffs and arrange a meeting to discuss about the report. This will help the company to analyze the performance of each staffs and the challenges they are facing (Nguyen et al. 2014).

One on one coaching is helping to improve the performance of the staffs in the organization. The manager of the company can offer one on one session to the marketing manager as he carries out the main management of the marketing activities. One on one session will be done through a meeting on a weekly basis in which the marketing managers will share the performance of every staff and the manager of the company will offer improvement plan and guidelines on it. On the other hand, marketing manager will carry out on one meeting with the advertising head, PR head and other marketing department to discuss the modification in the plan and the new target that is required to be met (Charlton 2016).

Monitoring

The performance to date of the marketing staff has been good which is evident by the increase in the amount of sale of the company and a good amount of traffic in its online business. However, it is necessary for the business to maintain such performance in the future in order to be one of the best home-ware companies in Brisbane and in Australia. For the purpose, the actions that the marketing manager can continue to take include setting up of monthly marketing plan after analyzing the achievement of the previous months, to carry out training on marketing updates and introduction of new marketing tools and recruit staffs when necessary according to the advanced marketing techniques. These steps will help the marketing manager to continue the achievements in the upcoming years.

According to the report provided by the Lamberts Consulting on the home-ware business of Brisbane, it is seen that from the marketing activity the company has been able to increase their market share in Brisbane from $175 million to $199 million within six months of the marketing plan. Thus, the company was able to meet the targeted growth of 10 percent for the year that it planned for its marketing goals. The average stores sale also increased by the estimated target by $28,200 per week in each stores. This good growth took place due to marketing efforts. However, the web-based marketing did not show much improvement and thus, further marketing objectives should focus on more online-based sales rather than store sales. Marketing plan should be set according to the target.

The success gap in the marketing plan that was set by the company was seen in the stagnancy in the number of physical stores and lack of growth of online selling channels. The gap existed because according to the set target in the KPI eh company had to achieve a growth in its physical stores and online sale. The sale of the company had increased as targeted; however, the increase in sale was all from its existing stores. Moreover, online marketing was not achieved as expected by the company. The main cause of such gap is that the marketing team focused more on increasing market sale through increasing sale rather than increasing stores. The way of achieving market share was different then the set KPIs. On the other hand, the company lacked the knowledge about online sale and thus failed to take desired steps for its development (Casero-Ripollés  and Izquierdo-Castillo 2013).

Distribution

The marketing outcome was good; however, the company should focus on increasing the number of stores as competitors are trying to capture the home-ware market in Australia. Thus, in order to improve its strategic performance the company should focus its plan on one single thing in one time and after desired result, it should move to other strategies (Wu and Onari 2016). This will help them get the most expected result from all types of strategies.

The over-performance was seen in the increase in the average store sale, which was estimated to increase only by 8.5 percent. It increased by 12 percent, which was much above than the targeted percent. This was much more then the targeted increase in the sale from the store. This was because the marketing team focused more on the in-store sale rather than other sources of sale such as online business. The trend shows that the marketing team did not take any step towards the promotion of the online business, which resulted in zero sales from the online website. Moreover, the team did not even focus in increasing more physical store from capturing the market share and just focused in increasing market share through sale volume.

The targeted plan for the next one year will be mainly on online business (Holden 2013). The company will hire and train personnel about online business and invest more and more on internet marketing. The target is to achieve a 20 percent of its revenue from the online business.

References

Baker, M.J., 2014. Marketing strategy and management. Palgrave Macmillan.

Casero-Ripollés, A. and Izquierdo-Castillo, J., 2013. Between decline and a new online business model: The case of the Spanish newspaper industry. Journal of Media Business Studies, 10(1), pp.63-78.

Charlton, C.T., 2016. Effects of a self-management procedure using student feedback on staff members’ use of praise in an out-of-school time program. Utah State University.

Davcik, N.S. and Sharma, P., 2015. Impact of product differentiation, marketing investments and brand equity on pricing strategies: A brand level investigation. European Journal of Marketing, 49(5/6), pp.760-781.

Garvey, B., Garvey, R., Stokes, P. and Megginson, D., 2017. Coaching and mentoring: Theory and practice. Sage.

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Holden, G., 2013. Starting an online business for dummies. John Wiley & Sons.

Kotler, P., Hessekiel, D., and Lee, N. 2012. Good Works!: Marketing and Corporate Initiatives that Build a Better World… and the Bottom Line. John Wiley & Sons.

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Strauss, J., 2016. E-marketing. Routledge.

Van Heerde, H.J. and Neslin, S.A., 2017. Sales promotion models. In Handbook of marketing decision models (pp. 13-77). Springer, Cham.

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