Monitoring Marketing Strategies and Tactics for Fruit Juice Drinks - Assignment Example

Implement and Monitor Marketing Activities Author’s Name Grade course Institution Tutor Date Task Two: Monitoring Marketing Strategies and Tactics for Fruit Juice Drinks 1. Overall objective and measures for monitoring marketing For the marketing campaign to succeed, it is extremely important that marketers do make regular checks as to the effectiveness of the marketing strategy. This ensures that the management is able to control in an effective manner how the marketing strategy is working out. The measures that would need to be considered include a sales analysis. The quantity of sales for the fruits juice both in terms of units sold and the returns is very important to determine how profitable the enterprise is (Silk 2006, 123). The other important element is expense analysis. The marketing expense to sales ratio is crucial as it determines whether the expenses incurred are justifiable. Market share analysis is another important metric to determine how well the fruit juice business is doing. A high and rising market share is an indicator of the fact that brand is popular with customers while a declining market should be a cause for alarm. Financial analysis is an integral part of determining if marketing strategies are going well. Businessmen engage in business activities with the aim of making a profit. Financial analysis includes a number of items which are very important in determining whether the activities of the business are worth all the effort. Two of the most important measures are gross profit and net profit. Gross profit refers to the difference between sales and cost of sales. A high amount of gross profit indicates that a business has the potential to make good returns for the business owners (Silk 2006, 129). Net profit is perhaps as important if not more important than the gross profit. Net profit is the difference between the gross profit and other expenses such as rent, administrative expenses, discounts, and others. A high net profit reflects expenses that are well managed while a low net profit indicates unmanageable expenses for the business. 2. Monitoring of the company's objectives In order to achieve the overall objectives of the organization, the management needs to monitor a number of elements which are critical for the success of the business. The product, in this case the juice, should be one that satisfies the demands of the consumers. The product does have a life cycle starting with growth, maturity and finally a decline in sales. The marketers for the juice need to assess the likely length of the juice's life cycle. Taking such an approach would enable the marketers to anticipate various challenges that are likely to arise in the lifetime of the product. The marketers for the juice would look at the possibility of increasing the capacity of the production lines that produce the juice so as to increase the quantity. In order to ensure that higher sales are realized, the marketers should ensure that they exploit the good brand name for the company or work hard to build a strong and reputable brand (Powell 2008, 79). Promotion is another element which determines whether an organization meets its set target or not. The marketer should make use all necessary methods of communication so as to reach all people who would be expected to consume the juice (Austin 1996, 25). The marketers would have to choose the forms of communication that are cost effective and reach the highest number of people possible. Advertisement could be through the social media and internet in general, radio or even television (Powell 2008, 82). The company could also consider engaging in public relations activities such as participating in trade fairs, exhibitions and offering sponsorships. It is important to ensure that members of the public have good opinion on the fruit juice as this would help through word of mouth advertisements by referrals from a satisfied customer to a potential customer. Pricing for the juice is critical if the company is to attain its bottom line. Proper pricing ensures that a company posts handsome profits. Placing a price on the juice would be tricky since sales and demand largely depend on how much the product costs. The price set should therefore be set bearing in mind that there are other competing products and the cost of production should be considered too. The marketers should first determine what the customers perceive to be the value of the juice produced. It is important to try and indicate to the consumers that the fruit is different and hence better than the competing brands in the market (Parmenter 2007, 51). The fruits juice can only be purchased if it is available to the consumers. The marketers should embrace strategies that would ensure that the products are available to as many potential consumers as possible. 3. How the progress of the marketing activities should be reported within the organization Progress of the marketing activities needs to be assessed against the set benchmarks. The progress reports provide the management with the relevant information as to whether the organization is performing below expectations or above expectations. The information so obtained enables the management to change tact where it is clear that the current marketing strategy appears to be less effective than envisaged (Fitz-Gibbon 1990, 71). The marketing operations professionals should collect data on a daily basis and prepare weekly, monthly, and even annual reports regarding the sales. The marketing operations professionals should report to the manager in charge of marketing ideally on a weekly basis and who should report to the Chief Finance Officer in the company. Marketing is a very delicate issue and it has characteristics of arts and sciences. Marketing could be said to be an art since marketers employ creativity in promoting their products while measurements and analyses to improve performance employs scientific tools. Marketer should come up with key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which provide the needed data which can be used to improve the performance of the company (Fitz-Gibbon 1990, 71). For the company selling fruit juice, KPIs include new customers that are acquired. Other KPIs include the profits made from the sale of the fruit juice, the revenue obtained from different areas or regions, and the number of customers lost. Similarly, the KPIs should be reported to the manager in charge of marketing ideally at on a weekly basis. The marketing manager should report to the chief finance officer on a regular basis and finally the report should get to the chief executive as well as the board when it meets (Baker & Hart 2008, 644). Task Three: Evaluate and Improve Marketing Performance 1. How the company should assess the marketing activities for the fruit juice In determining whether the juice brand is performing as well as it should, the marketing department should analyze the marketing strategy with a view to improving its efficiency. Measuring performance should ensure that the strategies and marketing activities are in tandem with the goals of the business. In order to determine the effectiveness of marketing for the fruit juice it is important that the data collected in appropriate. The marketing department should also collect the data with a lot of accuracy for it to be reliable. It is also critical that the senior management authorizes the marketing department on the kind of data that should be collected. The process of collecting data is quite easy (Parmenter 2007, 63). The hard part comes in making analysis of the data so collected so as to give it some sense. It is through data analysis that the organization can determine how it can make more effective and efficient to market the fruit juice. Using the marketing mix modeling, the company can use a number of metrics which can be used to determine how effective the marketing strategies employed have been on the amount of sales made. With this kind of information, the company would be in a position to predict how the different tactics are likely to affect the amount of sales. There are two components which make up the total sales made. The first component is the base sales. Base sales refer to natural demand for the fruit juice which depends on the season, the price of the product and brand awareness and brand loyalty (Baker & Hart 2008, 644). The other component is incremental sales. Incremental sales depend on promotion as well as marketing. Incremental sales can be categorized into whether they are due to advertising through television, radio or print media. Classifying the sales into those that do not depend on the company's marketing activities and those that result from marketing would provide useful data on sales figures for the fruit juice. The base sales volume is supposed to increase as time goes by. However, marketing results in the base sales increasing over a long time. The increase in the base sales for the fruit indicates that the users have become loyal to the brand. It is possible to determine the effectiveness of various advertisements through the Gross Rating Points. This is determined by the increase in the amount of sales after a given time, such as a week, after the advertisement has been aired. The company should determine the least number of Gross Rating Points that are needed in a week to positively affect the volume of sales (Kotler 2008, 1021).The company could also determined the point at which advertising does not result in a further increase in the amount of sales at which point the saturation limit is said to have been reached. The company could determine the impact of using advertisements of various lengths (Burrow & Bosiljevac 2009, 614). It is also important that the company determine which adverts have a greater positive impact on the volume of sales, whether it is those aired during prime time or during other times. Every marketing plan always involves trade promotions. The purpose of promotions is to increase the volume of sales within a short term following such trade promotions. It is quite difficult though not impossible to determine how promotional activities affect the sales for the fruit juice. Marketing mix models are important in understanding of the rise in the amount of sales. The figures can be determined by estimating the sales' increments in different stores which stock the fruit juice. Through such activities, it is possible to determine channels that are very helpful to the efforts to sell the fruit juice (Kotler 2008, 1022). The information obtained can be utilized to make a trade plan which is the most effective through use of channels that are effective and the best promotion activities. Use of the marketing mix models gives information as to the effect that an increase in unit price has on the volumes sold. Competition also affects the sales of the fruit juice. Where a competitor adopts a better sales promotion model, this could result in the sales of the fruit juice experiencing a dip. 2. Documenting recommendations for improvements in marketing performance. The recommendations which are made to improve the marketing performance of the fruit juice should be properly documented depending on the stakeholder required to handle the information. It is important for the organization to bridge the rift that might exist between the teams involved in sales and marketing as researchers have established that it results in revenues increasing by a large volume. There are two reports known as daily dashboards, and detailed monthly reports which document the by the sales and marketing departments. Using dashboards presents data from the company's reporting system by giving previews of the progress made by the teams on a day to day basis (Sandhusen 2000, 321). Dashboards are supposed to be shared with the whole team involved in sales and marketing. Dashboards should therefore be included in the customer relationship management system which is part of the marketing software. Alternatively, the reports can be sent through emails to the sales and marketing team. By publicizing the daily report enables the organization to determine whether it is moving towards achieving its objectives. Making the report public also pushes the team members to work hard and attain their goals. This is due to the fact that people involved in sales and marketing are more likely to work harder and achieve their targets when they realize that everybody in the team shall see how they performed (Lenskold 2003, 271). The marketing dashboard can also be referred to as the daily leads waterfall graph. It is a way through which a team's progress towards attaining its goals is presented in a visual manner. A graph brings out a comparison between the daily amounts posted and the target that one should reach so as to attain the goals expected by the end of the month. When the leads are lagging behind, this is an indicator that the team is behind in terms of attainment of is set goals and this calls for the marketing team to put in more effort so as to attain its set objective. If on the other hand the leads are ahead, it is an indication that the organization is ahead in terms of marketing the fruit juice. This is a boon to the marketing team and it can strategize on how to meet the targets for the coming days. The second type of report is the monthly report. Dashboards provide just the sneak preview of just the very important metrics for the sales and marketing teams. It is important that a monthly report is prepared detailing the strategies employed in sales and marketing as well as the results obtained (Sandhusen 2000, 301). The monthly report ought to be sent to every person who is a stakeholder in the company. This ensures that the sales and marketing departments are not only transparent but also that they are making enough efforts to ensure that the entire business enjoys success. In the monthly report, there should be charts which indicate the daily amount of work completed every day by the sales and marketing team. The monthly report should indicate how activities carried out by the marketing have impacted on the sales and this information should be presented using charts. References Austin, R.D, 1996, Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, New York: Dorset House Publishing. Baker, M. J., & Hart, S. J., 2008, The marketing book, Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann. pp.644 Burrow J., & Bosiljevac, J., 2009, Marketing. Mason, OH, South-Western Cengage Learning. Fitz-Gibbon, C.T, 1990, Performance Indicators, Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters pp.111 Kotler, P., 2008, Principles of marketing, Upper Saddle River, N.J., Pearson Prentice Hall. pp.1020 Lenskold, J., 2003, Marketing ROI the path to campaign, customer, and corporate profitability. New York, McGraw-Hill. pp.268 Parmenter, D, 2007, Key Performance Indicators, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Powell, G. R., 2008, Marketing Calculator: Measuring and managing return on marketing investment, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Sandhusen, R., 2000, Marketing. Hauppauge, N.Y., Barron's. pp. 559 Silk, A. J., 2006, What is marketing? Boston: Harvard Business School Press. pp. 207 Read More