Saxonville Sausage Company

Saxonville Sausage Company

Situation

Saxonville is a 70-year-old company that is headquartered out of Saxonville, Ohio. The company produces a variety of pork sausage products, predominantly fresh sausage, such as brats and breakfast sausage. Saxonville products are sold throughout the United States via both national and regional brokers and distributors, but they have very little distribution in the Northeastern markets.

In recent years, Saxonville’s brat and breakfast sausage markets have been flat nationwide, with little to no growth expected in the near future. In contrast, the “Italian sausage was a market that was showing growth across producers in the retail sausage market, having grown at an annual rate of 9% in 2004 and 15% in 2005.” (Moore, 2007) Saxonville’s line of Italian sausage products, sold under the name Vivio, was released in 2001 and is primarily distributed throughout Northeastern markets.

With such large growth rates in the Italian sausage market, Saxonville is looking at how to grow Vivio into nationwide. The company hired a new product marketing director, Ann Banks, to help bring Saxonville’s Italian sausage “to market in order to achieve its profit objectives for the next fiscal year.” (Moore, 2007)

Problem

Saxonville’s namesake products are underperforming within their market and as such, the company is looking to develop and expand Vivio, their newly created line of Italian sausage products that are currently performing well in key markets. To meet their goal of moving their position in Italian sausage, Saxonville faces the following strategic decisions:

• How to “create a distinctive identity,” (Moore, 2007) for their Italian sausage product allowing it to stand out among the competition, including whether or not to package the new sausage under the current brand name of Vivio, under the well-recognized Saxonville label, or create an entirely new label brand.

• Identify their target markets and locations through a “well-thought-out positioning plan…to move from our also-ran position in Italian sausage to national category leader and make our product one that every major grocery account in the U.S. will want to carry.” (Moore, 2007)

• Determine the branding concept that will best align with consumers.

Analysis

Saxonville is known for their “exceptional product quality” (Moore, 2007) in the brat and breakfast sausage market in the Midwest. They have been family owned and operated for over 70 years. In 2001 they expanded their product line to include Vivio Italian sausage to capitalize on the excellent market growth of Italian sausage.

With the declining brat and breakfast sausage market, Saxonville wants to expand their stake in the Italian sausage market nationwide in an effort to meet next year’s profit objectives. While expanding into the Italian sausage market, Saxonville wants to make sure that they do not “inadvertently encourage cannibalization of the other products.” (Moore, 2007)

To achieve this goal, the Saxonville marketing team used a four-step process. The steps are described as follows:

“The first round of qualitative research will target consumers to understand their behaviors and needs. The second step is a sequential round of consumer sessions, where we’ll use the language we’ve heard to develop and then gain reactions to different positioning ideas. In the third round we refine all the new learning into actual concepts and have consumers prioritize and improve them. In the forth step, the concepts are put through monadic testing, and in the end, among other things, we look at the purchase intent scores the testing generates.” (Moore, 2007)

Step One: Planning New Research on the Target Customer

In step one “four highly interactive mini pilot groups were put together to get a quick handle on what current Italian sausage users had to say about their use of the product.” (Moore, 2007) They started with an empty plate and put together a group of 103 head-of-household females “to get a clear understanding of product benefits, attributes and ideals, and to develop a solid feel for core values and the role this product plays, or can play, in these people’s lives.” (Moore, 2007)

In this round, three groups of Italian sausage users clearly emerged. Heavy users, light users, and non-users. “All three groups responded that Italian sausage made their lives easier because it was a meal that their husbands and children enjoyed.” (Moore, 2007) Some “said it ‘had the same effect as popcorn at the movie theater,’ in that ‘the minute you smelled it you have to have some.” (Moore, 2007) “Italian sausage is considered a great ‘meal-maker.’ Unlike bratwurst and breakfast sausage.” (Moore, 2007)

The respondents scored “Italy’s Best” as the top scoring name above both Vivio and Saxonville. The respondents that were in the geographic “areas of where Saxonville Bratwurst were distributed, ‘Saxonville’ was considered a poor brand name among Italian sausage users due to its more ‘German-seeming’ heritage.” Although consumers stated that they knew Saxonville by its slogan, ‘The Family Company,’ and believed it was a well-established business that would make good products.” (Moore, 2007) And “they believed anything from Saxonville would have exceptional product quality.” (Moore, 2007)

Step Two: Building on Learning from the Focus Group

With the first step complete, the next step required an in-depth look at the data generated from the pilot groups. The marketing team created a perceptual map that showed “visually the key stressors in the respondents’ stories.” (Moore, 2007) The predominant finding was that “the women in the focus group described hectic family lives…Their ‘ideal’ was to make wholesome and appealing meals that the entire family-adults and children-would love to eat.” (Moore, 2007) As a result of these findings, “Italian sausage was revealed as a ‘meal solution’.” (Moore, 2007)

Respondents “expressed a strong desire to be nurturing mothers and homemakers and to help create happy childhood memories for their children.” (Moore, 2007) The typical focus group participant spoke of how they wanted to make mealtime simpler and how to bring the family back to the table. The map showed “customers dinner dilemmas” (Moore, 2007), and it showed that Italian sausage is family-pleasing and easy to make.

Step Three: Building Positioning Concepts

To carry out the third step