Strategic Management- 2 Written Assignments

Running head: MARKETING STRATEGY 1

MARKETING STRATEGY 2

Marketing strategy

Grace Walters

Rasmussen College

Strategic Management

Andrea Barnum Phatak

June 14, 2015

Marketing Strategy- Michael Kors

The strategic objectives of this company are to come up with a marketing strategy which is a plan for marketing that is designed to achieve the marketing goals. A strategic plan is therefore a comprehensive planning that involves marketing research and then develops a marketing mix to amuse customers. Instead of offering our customers a one size fits all offer and expecting the mass market to take up, the company should focus on tailoring what they can do to the wants and needs of different segments. The company needs to dig deep into the particular behaviors that encourage customer groups.

When shifting the marketing strategy from a focus on the lower-end products to the higher-end ones, the company can adopt product differentiation strategy. Differentiation is the process of distinction the differences of an offering or a product, to make it more eye-catching to a specific target market. Organizations have diverse resource endowments that allow them to build particular competitive advantages over their competitors. Endowment of resources will permits our company to be different and this will reduce the competition and make it possible for us to reach new market segments (Kotler & Gary, 2012).

Although research in a niche market may cause change in a product in order to improve differentiation, these changes themselves are not differentiation. Product or marketing differentiation is the process of defining the differences between services or products or the ensuing list of differences. This is done so as to show the unique aspects of our company’s products and build a sense of value. Successful product differentiation will lead to monopolistic competition and is not consistent with the conditions for a good competition, which includes the necessity that the products of our competitors are also good substitutes. The aim of differentiation is to build up a position in which prospective customers view as unique.

Differentiation will affect the performance of our company by reducing the directness of competition. As our products become more different, categorizing becomes more difficult and thus draws less comparison with our competitors. A product differentiation strategy that is successful will move our products from competition that is primarily based on price to competition that is based on non price factors such as promotion variables, distribution strategy and product characteristics. If the customers love our offer, they will become less sensitive on the offers of our competitors and price may not be one of the aspects. Differentiating will make customers in a given market segment become less sensitive to other features of a product.

An alternative strategy would be Market segmentation which is a very crucial part of a marketing strategy of any company. It involves breaking big markets into smaller ones and more harmonized customer groups that can be marketed to more effieciently. A market can be segmented in many ways. It is the work of marketers to decide which strategy is good for which product. At times, the best option is arrived at by using different strategies combined.

Our market segmentation strategy will entail dividing our markets based on demographics, geographic, psychographic and behavorial. Segmenting the market according to demographic is one of the most popular approaches to market segmentation. Understanding who the customers are will enable our company to identify and understand their needs more closely, their products wants and rate of usage. With this strategy, our company will divide the huge market into smaller groups based on a number of defined traits. These traits include education, occupation, marital status, gender, race, age and income. This strategy has large amounts of secondary data obtainable that will enable us divide the market according to the variables of demographics.

We can also segment our market with the geographic criteria which entails postal codes, neighborhoods, cities, countries, regions, states or nations. This approach will combine the demographic data with geographic one to create a more accurate precise profile.

Psychographic segmentation will try to answer why the customers purchasing behaviors are the way they are. In this strategy, we will divide our markets into groups on the basis of values variables, lifestyle and personality. Segmenting consumers into lifestyles will be based on the idea that the lifestyle of a person has an impact that is direct on their interest in the product. Since the personality traits have been matched with the categories of products that customers support as well as the persuasive pleas they respond to, we can use the personality variables to divide our market. This approach will divide our buyers into segments based on their responses, uses, attitudes and knowledge towards a product. In our behavior segmentation, we can divide our customers into groups according to their readiness stage, loyalty status, response, usage rate, attitude towards and knowledge of a product.

References

Guillinan, P. (1993). A Strategic Framework for Assessing Product Line Additions. Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Kotler, P. & Kevin, L. (2006), Marketing Management (12 Ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Kotler, P. & Gary, A. (2012). Principles of Marketing. Pearson Education Limited.