Segmentation Targeting and Positioning

MARKETING STRATEGY

CASES’ POINTERS

ALLIED VAN LINES

Gist of the case

The case is regarding Allied van lines and is primarily focusing on the issues of awareness creation and creating a distinct image in the minds of consumers through creating or changing their current advertising campaign, which is effective and also falls into a specified budget level. For selecting the appropriate budget level and to see the advertising effectiveness, two types of on-air testing were conducted, i.e. Day after Recall and a Pre-post Study. The day after recall method provided the percentage of random sample of people who could recall the commercial one day after it had been shown (30% recalled). The pre-post study on the other hand was used to measure changes in consumer knowledge and attitudes from before the commercial was aired to afterwards. The study basically had 3 different groups of cities, different flight durations with different schedules of fringe and prime times (4-8 weeks) and different advertising spending levels (1, 2, 3 million). The study started with a pretest through telephone questionnaire and after airing the commercial, after 4 weeks the same questionnaire was conducted with another random sample to measure changes in awareness level.

Main Actors

Arthur Brooks (Vice President of Marketing) and the advertising agency.

Major Decisions

• Whether any advertising should be undertaken?
• Should the current advertising campaign be changed?
• What would be the proposed level of expenditure?
• Which medium should be used?

Learning

It is highly important for any company to have an effective advertising campaign so that it can be able to create a distinct image in the minds of its consumers and also the selection of the appropriate medium is really important in order to deliver the message effectively to the right audience.

Important Points

• 4 major indicators of the pre-post study included First mention, aided awareness, unaided awareness and intention to contact.
•  Concentrated Industry with top 5 competitors.
• Interstate cost regulated by ICC
• Mature market
• Target market( Young families in professional occupations, executives, department of defense)
• Potential inter-agent competition
• Industry’s advertising has gone primarily unnoticed.
• Trucks were the most important in creating awareness

Likely Decision

• National print Campaign
• Local advertising by agents (direct mail, print, spot tv, spot radio, billboards, trucks)

HubSpot

Gist of the case

The case is regarding HubSpot, a software company, which provided inbound marketing services. The company had reached a milestone of 1000 customers and now wanted to accelerate their growth and increase the profitability. They basically themselves also used inbound techniques to acquire customers and now they were facing the issues that their customers faced while using inbound techniques. So basically they were facing a dilemma that if they themselves couldn’t get enough scale through inbound marketing, how could they convince their customers to do so?

Main Actors

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

Major Decisions

• Which customers to serve?
• Decisions about current pricing model.
• Whether they needed to incorporate outbound model with inbound to increase growth and profitability?

Learning

Important Points

• 3 distinct skills required for inbound (content, distribution of content, engage audience who interacted with the content)
• Cost of generating a lead through inbound was 5-7 times less than outbound.
• Keyword grader, linkgrader
• Software-as-a-service pricing strategy (monthly payments)
• Low cost and ease of use
• Target Market( professional services, healthcare, software, real estate)
• Owners Ollie (73%) and Marketer Mary (27%)
• B2C customers had higher churn rates
• After 19 months, churn rate starts declining.

Likely Decisions

Marketer’s mary as they have a lower churn rate than owners ollie and also because they stayed longer due to their reliance on the monthly analytic reports.

FAMVIC

Gist of the case

The case is regarding Famvic, a product marketed by STEDEC. Famvic was marketed as a health tonic for those who could not afford to have amino acids through protein, as it was an expensive source or the ones who were protein deficient. While launching the product, STEDEC thought that the product met market requirements, was inexpensive to manufacture, researched and met the market demand. Initially it was positioned as an ethical product which was later changed to an over the counter product due to slow growth in sales. Famvic changed different distributors with the hope of increasing sales, but all in vain. UDL was hired by famvic who changed the positioning and asked them spend 2 million and in return 200,000 bottles would be sold. New advertising was followed and sales grew but could not be maintained. A study was then conducted by a group of students regarding why consumers were not buying the product.