Marketing Plan Strategy

This past week was a very busy one, filled with lots of typing, brainstorming, skyping, and stressing. Our team spent most of our week discussing which strategy plans would be best for our company. We identified four major issues:

-poor participation in co-op advertising and point of purchase promotion
-low pharmacist and doctor recommendations
-declining market share
-possibilities to introduce new product lines/reformulate

Our team decided to tackle these issues in a few different ways.

In order to solve the issue of low participation in our advertising and promotion programs, we decided to dedicate more of our budget to these areas. However, at the same time we limited our advertising budget to $15M since research showed that our brand spent the most on advertising of all the competition. Since we are the market leader, we typically don't have to spend as much on advertising as brands who are fighting to become the market leader.

In order to increase recommendations by pharmacists and doctors, we had a pretty simple solution: increase the number of detailers. 

Our declining market share was a big concern of ours. We had multiple ideas in order to increase or keep our current market share. One of these strategies was to target our advertising towards demographic groups who Allround is not the most frequent brand purchased. By doing this, groups who do not often purchase our brand will receive more advertising messages about our product and thus be more likely to purchase Allround. We also chose to change our advertising messages to more reminder messages since our brand is a market leader at its mature stage. We drastically decreased our comparison messages to less than 5% since market leaders do not typically compare themselves to the competition. This was a flaw of the marketing team in the past few periods. Another strategy that we hoped would increase or maintain market share was the introduction of a new product in the upcoming periods. One of the options for product introduction is a unique allergy capsule that is non-drowsy due to an ingredient that the company will submit for OTC use to the FDA. This would give Allround a superior advantage over the competition in the allergy market. In addition, our team conducted a market attractiveness analysis and found that the allergy market in all demographics is a very attractive one to enter.

These are some of the strategies that our marketing team chose to pursue in order to address our major key issues. Of course, there are many other modifications that the marketing team may make in the upcoming periods but none of them are addressed specifically to the four identified key issues. We hope that these changes will help to solve these issues and put our brand in a better position to maintain market leader status and profitability. 

Overall, the assignment was very stressful and time consuming. I must say that trying to fit four very busy people's schedules into meeting multiple times a week is not easy. We did the best we could to not simply assign sections but rather discuss each section as a team to decide where we wanted to aim our efforts. Although I was not at all a fan of the situation analysis, it truly ended up being a gift when writing the strategy plan. Most of our issues were identified by the situation analysis which made the assignment that much easier.

We will see how our brand does in the upcoming periods when we implement our plan. Here's to wishful thinking!