Video presentation for final project (Essays Guru where you at)

Building a strong brand is equal to, and in some cases, more fundamental than the company’s offering itself. An organization’s inability to understand its target market in a highly competitive market may affect its ability for successful operations. It is always easy to get carried away with complex strategies in creating a product brand (Babbit et al, 2016). To develop a strong brand, Veezy Company will target its ideal client. To do this it will create a clear and suitable client avatar. In particular, it will consider the target markets demographic features like age, favorite television shows, online status, fears, dislikes and education level as well as dreams in creating a strong product brand. According to Babbitt et al. (2016) a company should identify its target customers’ key features in order to shift its messaging to suit their needs. Also, the company will serve a specific niche market, particularly persons between the age of 25 and 35 years. By being specific, the company will easily create a memorable experience in the niche.

Veezy Company is aware that product price is one of the major overriding factors and for this reason it has set prices that fit all buyers regardless of their socioeconomic status. Most importantly the customers get value for their money for every product they buy. Hence, the company will use marginal cost pricing strategy to attract the target consumers. Ferrell and Hartline (2014) points out that this type of pricing strategy can help in smoothing demand fluctuations and attracting different market segments. It is a good way of remaining in business during difficult economic times and prices can be increased later on when the economic situation stabilizes.

Veezy Company, with proper management, should attract suitable distributors who are not only willing to collaborate but also provide access to target market that will determine the company’s reach, revenue as well as long term goals. The company should have productive distribution channels that deliver benefits to value chain players in order to increase sales and minimize operational costs. Baker (2014) points out that a proper distribution can work best if an organization has effective plans for establishment of effective distribution channels to help with the efficient movement of products to the customers. To increase its market share across the whole world, Veezy will prefer the pull distribution strategy to the push distribution strategy. Ferrell and Hartline (2014) posit that in pull strategy it is the customer who is actively seeking out a company’s offering and retailers will always place for stock orders based on consumer demand. To increase consumer motivation to buy the product the company will utilize different promotional tools like mass media, advertisements, discounts as well as customer loyalty.

Veezy’s Competitors

The liquor industry (in which Veezy Company operates) is characterized with intense intra brand competition. Baker (2014) defines intra brand competition as the one existing among different companies that create different product brands to differentiate them from competitors’ products serving the same market segment. Some of the intra brand competitors include Heaven Hill, Barcardi, Gallo, Mahou San Miguel, Heineken and Pernod Ricard. These companies produce different distilled alcohol brands like Vodka, Whiskey, Rum, Gin as well as Jameson. Park Street (2014) indicates that the United States alcoholic beverage market controls 60 percent (211.6 billion United States dollars) of the 354.2 billion beverage industry. The distilled spirits account for 37 percent of alcoholic beverage sales with Vodka, Whiskey and Rum representing 34 percent, 24 percent and 12 percent of distilled spirit sales respectively. However, Taylor (2016) points out that Absolute Vodka sales percentage has declined in the United States market, while that of Jameson Irish Whisky has increased. This is because of consumers’ perception about the authenticity of these two brands. Nonetheless, Park Street (2014) points out that the wines and spirit industry has been growing at compound annual growth rate of 2 percent over the last decade, while revenue growth has outpaced the industry’s growth with a compound annual growth rate of 4 percent. This presents a formidable opportunity for Veezy Company to increase its sales as well as market share.

Internal analysis is an important component of marketing plan. This is where an organization identifies and evaluates its specific characteristic such as resources, capabilities and core competencies to determine its strengths and weaknesses. Also, it is important to consider a company’s vision, mission, strategic objectives and strategies. Strengths refer to an organization’s resources and capabilities that it can utilize to develop a sustainable competitive advantage. Weaknesses, on the other hand, are the resources as well as capabilities that an organization is lacking, hence impairing its ability from creating a sustainable competitive advantage (Baker, 2014). An internal analysis of Veezy Company indicates that the company has a strong brand identity, that is build from multidimensional dimensions like brand equity, product value as well as company standards. Also, the company has adopted a niche marketing strategy, by focusing on people between 25 and 35 years for its products rather than the mass marketing strategy. This implies that it will only focus its resources on serving the interest of most valuable customers. Thirdly, the company has adopted a standardized price that fits all consumers from different socioeconomic classes. Furthermore, the company produces higher quality products, good distribution channels to ensure that the products are readily available in the market. Finally, the company has the best customer relationship management in the industry. However, the company has not adopted new technological innovation for its operational activities. Also, the company controls a small market share compared to its major competitors like Heineken, Barcard and Pernod Ricard.

Table 1: Veezy Company’s Internal Analysis

Major economies are afflicted with product surpluses rather than shortages because of different product brands. Because of this an organization cannot win if it produces goods or services that resemble its competitors’ offerings. Hence, it is important to differentiate one brand from a similar one. Differentiation is the process of introducing a set of meaningful as well as valued difference in order to distinguish a company’s offerings from that of its competitors. Product differentiation helps an organization to avoid price wars. Companies can use different strategies such as product development, method of distribution or product promotion to achieve product differentiation (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). To differentiate Veezy from its competitors it will utilize different marketing mediums to carry out its advertising messages. In particular, it will use television advertisement, magazines as well as billboard advertisements. In addition, it will use various marketing vehicles like road shows, magazines (such as For Him, Men’s Health and Ralph) as well as newspaper. The best method will be airing product advertisements during television programs like Big Brother, that are commonly watched by persons aged between 25 and 35 years.

As noted earlier, the liquor industry has many players with some being the market leaders, others the market challengers and the remaining ones the market followers. Market leaders enjoy numerous benefits and also suffer from a number of drawbacks. They must constantly defend their positions as the ones with the largest market shares. They must also heavily invest in research and development for innovation purposes. This is very costly as well as time consuming with minimal room for error (Ferrell & Hartline, 2014). Nonetheless, Veezy Company intends to become a market challenger. This is due to the fact that it can use its position to capitalize on mistakes committed the market leader. Baker (2014) in his support posits that this enables market challengers to reduce their research and development expenses. Moreover, market challengers have shorter distribution lead times. Thirdly, market challengers are considered as aggressive as well as proactive organizations willing to challenge the market leader. Finally, because of lower overhead costs, market challengers are not only competitive but also respond more quickly.

To many organizations, social media marketing is a powerful tool to reach their target markets. Veezy Company is not an exception as it will utilize Facebook and Twitter to reach its target market. DeMers (2014) contends that organizations can utilize Twitter to increase their brand recognition. By doing so, an organization can become more accessible to both prospective and existing customers. For instance, a frequent Twitter user will have a chance to hear about a company for the first time from the newsfeed. Facebook and Twitter can tremendously decrease a company’s marketing costs. DeMers notes that in a certain study done by Hubpost, 84 percent of marketer indicated that company required as little as 6 hours in a week to increase their traffic. This number of hours is a insignificant investment for large social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. An organization can actually spend small amount of money for advertisements through Facebook and Twitter depending on its goals (2014)

Some enterprises jump into new trends without considering their integrated marketing communication strategies. Having an integrated marketing communication is the difference between being lucky and advertising with an objective. An effective integrated marketing communication highlights the core message, the company’s competitive advantage, target market and tailors the message in accordance with the requirements of the supportive media channels. It involves the view that an organization should coordinate its promotional efforts to achieve the most effective combined effort. The company should only allocate resources to the outcomes it values most (Nagle, Hogan & Zale, 2016).  Because of this Veezy will allocate resources on two important advertising strategies- repletion and celebrity endorsement to increase its sales and market share. Nagle, Hogan and Zale assert that repetition is very important especially when a company intends to communicate specific message to the consumers. Consumers are more likely to process such messages little by little during each exposure. In as far as celebrity endorsement is concerned celebrities are more likely to increase people’s attention to a particular advertisement (2016).

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