This is a group project.
Grading: This assignment is worth 40% of your final grade.
Breakup:
Phase-1 report: 10
Phase-2 report: 20
Presentation: 10
The best report in the class will be acknowledged and posted on my web page currently under construction (contingent on agreement).
Your Output: Phase-1 (Report for Steps 1, 2 and 3; Minimum length: 5 pages)
Phase-2 (Cumulative Report: Steps 1 to 6; Minimum length: 15 pages)
Copy of slides used for presentation
Presentation (Time: 17+3 minutes)
Electronic copy of final report and slides.
Deadline: Phase-1 is due October 31, 1996 at class time.
Phase-2 is due December 10/12, 1996 at class time.
Learning Objectives:
a. Working in teams.
b. Applying concepts learnt in class to real-life.
c. Seeing marketing at work- Recognizing the 4Ps for a category.
d. Integrating different sources (library work, field visit etc.) to come up with a complete report.
e. Report writing and presentation skills.
Bottom Line Learning Objective: To become marketing experts in one product category.
General Notes
a. It may be useful to represent share and sales data in graphical form.
b. You are expected to enclose proper references and copies of articles you use for Step 4. In Step 6, you are expected to include a copy of all advertisements you use. Please provide names and phone numbers of all managers you interact with.
c. Provide a one page executive summary that describes your key findings. Organize the report in sections and provide a table of contents.
Phase One
Step One: Please choose a product category that interests your group. Pointers on choosing the category:
1. Try to keep it manageable. If you choose 'cereal' as your product category, you are talking about some 130 plus major brands. That's a huge category to study. Ideally, you want no more than 10-15 brands in a category.
2. Try to choose a category for which you can get a lot of information.
3. You are welcome to choose a category that interests you the most (e.g. your future career industry, the industry in which you currently you work in.) If your group has a passion for the product category that will help you get more involved with the work and that generally leads to better quality work.
4. Please avoid choosing monopolistic categories since this will not maximize your learning potential.
5. Your final choice must be cleared by me.
Step Two: Brief Historical Analysis of Category
I would like you to begin by thinking about the product category in a historical context. Some of the questions you can focus on:
a. When was the product introduced? By whom?
b. What were the perceived benefits of the product category when it was introduced?
c. How has the industry changed over the years? Broad and significant trends only.
Step Three: Market Structure Analysis.
a. Make a list of all brands in the category and their latest unit and dollar market shares.
b. Prepare a list of the companies that own these brands and prepare company unit and dollar market shares. You are also required to come up with details about the company (e.g. head office, regional offices, contact persons, telephone and fax number).
c. If possible, a five year trend of brand unit/dollar market shares over the last five years. Trends?
d. Stage of the Product Life Cycle of this category (Please provide content based arguments based on the textbook as well as discussion in class.)
e. What is the nature of competition in this category? (e.g. Pure competition, oligopoly etc.)
Note: In order to help you with your data collection effort, I have placed a book called the 1996 Market Share Reporter on reserve. This book summarizes company and brand market share information for numerous categories. This can act as a starting point.
Step Four: Environmental Analysis.
a. Determine what are the key macro-environmental factors (both domestic as well as global) that have an impact on this industry. For this step, you are required to focus on two key class of factors. E.g. Cultural and Competitive.
You will have to spend some time figuring out which are the best classes of environmental factors you want to study. Relevance to the category and availability of information are two important criteria for this.
b. For each of these factors, you are expected to go over published sources and come up with key articles (at least three each) describing the issues involved in this industry. Then, based on these articles prepare a factual report of the environment that marketers have to work with in this industry.
You may want to work with the following published sources:
1. All the web sites in the WWW.
2. Fortune. 3. Business Week 4. Forbes
5. The Economist. 6. Harvard Business Review
7. Business Horizons 8. Sloan Management Review
9. Advertising Age 10. American Demographics
11. Infotrac/General Business File CD-ROM in the library
12. ABI/Inform / LEXIS/NEXIS database. 13. Wall Street Journal.
14. Any other source with instructor's approval.
Phase Two
For the remainder of this assignment, you will be working with the two biggest brands (in terms of market share) in the category and one other brand of your choice.
Step Five: Customer Analysis
For this section, we will be using the following data source: Simmons Market Research Bureau Inc.'s data on consumers of various products.We will be interested in using volumes P-1 to P-28.
Please do not check out these books or tear out the pages from them since all groups will be using them.
Each of these volumes describes the demographic and media habit details of the consumers of one product category. For example, Volume P-1 is all about 'Automobiles' and Volume P-28 is about 'Women's Beauty Aids, Cosmetics and Personal Products'. Right at the beginning of the each volume there is a list of contents which tells you the brands covered in the volume and the page numbers on which you will find details of that product's consumers. You may want to look at this before you choose your category.
Now, study the demographic and media habits of the consumers of the brands you have chosen. Pick out at least 5 demographic variables (e.g. age, education, occupation) and at least 3 media habit variables (e.g. Magazines read, TV evening network viewership, Sports Events viewership).
After constructing this information for all brands, highlight important differences and commonalities among the brands' customers. For example, you may find that the customers of Coors Light are mainly college educated and professionals by occupation whereas the Bud Light customers are predominantly high school educated and work in a Technical/Craftsman kind of job. In some categories, you may find that the customers for all brands are almost identical. That may be food for thought and it may help you interpret the category better.
One way of doing this may be to construct a 'typical customer' profile. This is done by choosing the class that has the highest percentage for every demographic and media habit variable. For example, you may find that the typical customer for JIF peanut butter is a married female with some high school and has a household income between $20,000 and $29,999.
Step Six: 4Ps Analysis
Product
Go to where all brands are sold. Examine all three brands carefully. What are the components of the 'total product' for each brand? (See Lecture 4 notes for details on how to do this.) What are the qualitative differences between the brands?
For example, you may find differences in Packaging (e.g. Mentadent vs. Crest), Number of varieties offered (e.g. Crest may be offering more varieties of the product in comparison to Colgate), Size of the Product (e.g. Budweiser offers most Bud products in packs of 18 whereas Coors may not), Nature of Product (e.g. Sensodyne may be the only brand to offer toothpaste that works for sensitive teeth) or any other differences.
Price
Get a current price list of all variants of all brands from at least two different stores where they are sold. How different are the prices between brands? How different are the prices across stores? Understand all the components of price. Is the product taxed? Is there an extra price if it is delivered? Try figuring out the bottom-line price to customers as well as all the components of this price.
It may be helpful to choose two very different types of stores where the products are sold. For example, if you get the price list from Safeway and Circle K for beer you may get sizeable differences.
If possible, talk to the store managers and get info. about the following:
a> Are these products offered on sale? How often? Any differences in the way these discounts are given?
b> Trends in prices. Have prices changed over the past 6-12 months? What does he/she think drove this change?
Place
Determine if all brands are distributed through the same stores. For example, does Price Club stock Bud, Coors and Miller?
You know the market share of each brand. Determine the 'shelf share' for each product. Use the following formula:
Space designated to one brand
Shelf share = -----------------------------------------
Space designated to the category
Note that if a brand is not carried by a store, its shelf share is 0.
Go to the dominant type of store in which the product is sold. For all food and alcohol items, this will be a supermarket or drug store. Then determine the proportion of the shelf space in the designated aisle that is assigned to each brand.
What does this tell you about the dominance of these brands in the marketing channel?
Promotion
Obtain at least three advertisements for each brand in the category. It will be easiest to use print ads. However, if you want use TV ads, you must describe the ad in the following format:
Brand: Bud Light
Length of ad: 30 seconds
Time seen: Tuesday, June 11, between 8-8:30 on ABC (Show: Home Improvement)
One line description: Humorous use of the 'I Love You, Man' theme using Barry White.
Detailed description: The ad begins with Barry White practicing in an empty hall. The main character appears in the hall, unshaven and informally dressed, and starts to praise Barry White. Uses the 'I Love You, Man' line. Barry says he likes the character's style and gives him a Bud Light. In his haste to get to it, the character spills the beer. The ad ends with him telling the ladies of Barry White's entourage that he had the beer in his hand and lost it.
Once you obtain the ads, perform the following analysis:
a. Relate the ads to the customer profile developed in Step 4. Does the ad appeal to the typical customers of the brand?
b. Is there a coherent advertising strategy used by the brand? For example, the advertising strategy may be to advertise in magazines with younger audiences (e.g. 'Rolling Stone') and use multiple appeals to reach them (e.g. humor, using a celebrity). Is this advertising strategy advisable? What are the risks involved?
c. Now, compare and contrast the advertising strategies of all three brands you are studying. What are the commonalities and what are the differences?
Step Seven:
By now, all of you must be ready to serve as marketing consultants to each of the brands that you have analyzed!!!
Step back from what you have done and summarize the marketing mix activity in this category. Talk about the intensity and nature of competition in this category and the marketing strategies being used by the organizations involved.
Describe the key idiosyncracies of this category and what you found most interesting. What did you learn about this category that you did not know to start off with?
If you had the VP(Marketing) for each brand you studied one-on-one for 2-3 minutes, what recommendations would you have for him/her?.
Report Writing Style
1. All submissions in this course will be word-processed. If you are not familiar with a program such as Word Perfect or Microsoft Word, please learn it as quickly as possible. I may be able to help you out with handouts etc.
2. Font size: 10-12 pt.
Line spacing: 1.5-2
Preferred Fonts: Times Roman, Dutch Roman, Bits Charter Roman
(Please stay away from gothic or flowery fonts).
3. You must spellcheck before submission.
4. The pages should be numbered. Sections should be clearly marked. If you are turning in a large report, please use spiral binding to put it together.
5. At the end of the course, all groups will be expected to turn in both hard copies as well as electronic copies of all reports (electronic copies must be saved in Word Perfect 5.1 format) to their instructors. The graded copies of the reports will be made available to the students for their perusal. But, neither will be returned and hence if you require a copy, please do so before submission.
Note: I encourage you to use the services of the Writing Center to improve on your report. But,
recognize that they can only improve your writing style- not the content.
Presentation Style
1. All groups are urged to use Microsoft Powerpoint to prepare their presentations. You can choose to either make regular slides or make an on-line presentation. I will provide you with the equipment if any group is interested in the latter.
2. Please do not read from your report or from index cards. It is OK to bring in material that will support your presentation. But, you are expected to have a clear flow and be fluent with the material. Think of it as a long conversation.
3. I would like to maintain a formal tone to all presentations. Imagine yourself standing in front of Fortune 50 CEOs (your classmates) and prepare with this mindset. Formal attire is suggested.
4. Be prepared for questions and take your time answering them. Remember you are the only person who knows most about what you are talking about. So, be confident.