Marketing objectives are essential to any marketing plan as it can clearly define a company or a brand’s overall goal (Kosaka, n.d.). Examples of marketing goals could be increasing brand awareness, driving online sales, increasing website traffic, etc. Without any clear marketing objectives, the journey for the company or brand to accomplish their goals and marketing strategy would be unclear and filled with difficulties and struggles. The biggest question you’re probably asking yourself is, “how do I define these marketing objectives or even make them?”
Think smart. That’s right, SMART. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (Kosaka, n.d.). Smart marketing objectives help anyone clearly define their company’s goals. The smart method is a great and useful way to help define goals and objectives to outline a perfect marketing plan that is accomplishable and able to pursue.
While defining clear objectives and creating these marketing plans, we have to consider any legal and ethical issues while developing plans. With today’s times, there are multiple marketing laws that clearly outline what we can and can’t do. One example of a legal issue to be careful of is misleading and/or making false claims which can lead to the misinterpretation of a company, brand, product or service (Marketing Ethics, 2020). These issues or anything similar can also lead to a company needing to revise their advertising, promoting and etc in order to align marketing objectives correctly while following the legal and ethical standards given to us.
Target audience is defined as the group of consumers characterized by their behavior and specific demographics (Carmicheal, 2020). Target audience is important for any business because they have to know and understand who they are marketing towards. From there, we can take this information and create a strong foundation for a marketing plan. A big question we can ask ourselves, “how can we define who are our target audience is?” Believe it or not, there are very useful tools that many companies utilize to help determine an answer.
One of the most helpful tools would be Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web analytic tool that allows us to see website insights, which can be sectioned off into age, gender, and location (Carmicheal, 2020). There are also charts and graphs which will allow for easier interpretation of how the data is broken down. Under the Audience tab in Google Analytics, there is other helpful areas we can use to define our target audience. There are sections such as demographics where we can view our audience’s age and gender and another section called affinity and in-market audiences (Kaplan, n.d). Affinity identifies users on their lifestyles, such as cooking, pet lovers, etc. (Kaplan, n.d.). In-market identifies users on their product-purchase interests such as home decor, computers, clothing, etc. (Kaplan, n.d.).
Another tool we can use Facebook Audience Insights. This tool can identify and help marketers learn more about their target audience (Roque, 2020). On Facebook Audience Insights, marketers can select a variety of audience criteria such as their location, age, interests, and behaviors (Roque, 2020). We can also learn in-depth about the audience, from the size of the target market, and trends in demographics and/or psychographics (Roque, 2020).
These are only two of many useful analytic web software that will be extremely useful for any marketing team. When a company first starts out and the marketing team is still developing their initial strategies, it seems difficult to gather and research every single thing about who are the consumers, who we want to sell and advertise to. With Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights, this allows marketers to obtain the beneficial data and information to define the target audience. It is no longer just assuming this and that about who the target market is. Technology today has allowed many companies and their marketing departments to use analytic tools to find this information to produce a successful marketing campaign.
Social listening is the process of tracking social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to a specific brand (Tran, 2020). From there, we analyze all the mentions and conversations for insights in order to discover more opportunities (Tran, 2020). Social listening requires a two step process:
Monitoring social media channels for any mentions/conversations of the brand, competitors, products, and keywords that relate to the business in question (Tran, 2020).
We then analyze the information for various ways and take what we learn to be put into action (Tran, 2020). Example: responding to customers or changing your whole brand positioning.
Social listening and social media monitoring can often be confused with each other as they sound similar. The difference between social media monitoring and social listening is that social listening looks past the numbers to consider the mood behind the data; whereas, social media monitoring views metrics such as engagement rate and number of mentions (Tran, 2020). The point is that social listening looks past the metrics and numbers of the reports and informs you how people feel about the brand and the competitor.
The impact social listening can give is opening more opportunities to engage with customers about the brand. This can also allow the company to reply to the customers if there are negative issues mentions or conversations about the brand. Rather than just seeing the number of mentions, companies can see how customers feel and respond to them in order to drive sales and increase the consumer to business relationship.
I consider this trend to be positive. It is extremely functional for any company to see and know how consumers feel about their brand. This will allow the company the chance to increase customer engagement. They can reply to positive or negative conversations or mentions in order to make customers feel they are heard and not ignored. Companies can also use all the mentions and conversations to know what customers are saying about their brand and apply the various insights to improve on their brand. We can also use social listening incase of a negative crisis relating to the brand (Tran, 2020). Social listening can help the company track any negative mentions due to a negative issue and the company can quickly respond or remove any posts that aren’t performing well. Overall, this trend can be seen as positive as it can be extremely useful and practical for any company to track mentions and conversations and gain insight about what consumers are saying about the brand.
PepsiCo is an American food and beverage company and is considered to be one of the largest in the world as they have products available in over 200 countries (PepsiCo Inc., n.d.). According to the official About the Company page located on the PepsiCo website, “PepsiCo is one of the world’s most-respected companies with products sold in more than 200 countries and territories and 22 brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales.” The product for PepsiCo will be called “Crafted Smoothie Kit.” This product will be known as a pre-packaged smoothie kit with various flavors as it will be quick and easy to blend for anyone to make when they are in a rush to work, the gym or school.
Marketing research is the primary means of determining how appropriate a product or service is to a brand and if it would be accepted and meet the standards or the organization (Babin, 2016). The marketing research we have conducted for this product launch has ranged from determining the target audience/market, the test market, creating a survey, gathering feedback from survey, determining the respondents for the survey, and etc. We have determined who we want to target and reach for this product, how we will market this product and how to gather informational data and feedback to gain insight from those within our target audience to appropriate adjust and modify the product and marketing campaign.
Industry trend that can have a significant impact on the success Crafted Smoothie Kit. The smoothie market is trending and, on the rise, currently. Smoothies were known to be just a smaller subsection within the snack and beverage category but now it has evolved to be a necessity drink when working out, as a dessert or quick and easy meal replacement (Top 10 Smoothie Market, 2019). According to Technavio, the smoothie market size will increase by $10.14 billion within 2020-2024. This shows that the smoothie industry is rapidly increasing, and it has yet to reach its full potential in terms of market size. Due to the increasing smoothie market trend, PepsiCo may have the possibility of selling out faster than the average product they sell in grocery stores. We can also face increasing sales due to the increasing market size in the later years of 2020-2024.
The proposed marketing strategy aligns to legal, ethical, and industry standards because the marketing strategy focuses and understands those different elements within the campaign strategy. We have carefully formulated the marketing strategy to legal standards to where the product will not be advertised falsely. If we market and advertise the product only has 100% natural flavoring and real fruits included, when in fact, the product does contain some artificial flavoring. This can lead to legal issues and ethical business practices that does not align our standards. The survey feedback we gather from respondents within our target market aligns with the growing industry standards in the smoothie market. As the smoothie market is currently growing, we are determine to gain feedback and insight to determine what new flavors to launch and how to market the product to specific consumer lifestyles.
The limitations I have came across while proposing the product and marketing research is the limited amount of competition to compare and contrast. The only big competitor PepsiCo’s Crafted Smoothie Kit has is with Dole. The issue with this limitation is just finding a product from Dole with enough information of their product to compare and contrast their marketing mix or the 4 P’s. Although the products are listed and found on their Dole website, it was difficult to find more detailed information beyond their website besides grocery stores. There were no articles written about the product’s launch, only grocery store listings but there was a limited amount of grocery stores that sold the product such as Krogers.
Key performance indicators, also known as KPIs, create important information typically required in order for users to determine and discuss how companies can improve their business and marketing goals, strategies and plans (Lake, 2019). In other words, KPIs are extremely beneficial and essential for businesses when trying to align the organization’s business goals. They are essential business metrics that allow companies be more informed and evaluate the company’s current marketing campaign progress and how to further succeed in the future.
For a better example, let’s discuss a fictional company. In this example, we will discuss an online retailer that recently redesigned their website for due to high bounce rates which they assumed it was due to the outdated website being hard to navigate and not mobile friendly as the target audience is teenagers and young adults. Let’s call this imaginary retailer, Good Day.
As mentioned, Good Day relaunched and redesigned their online retail website for a number of reasons mentioned previously. KPIs that can be definitely used for this business can be bounce rate, average time on page, and unique website visitors.
Bounce rates is the percentage of visitors who visit your website but then leave within a matter of seconds or minutes after one-page viewing (What is a Bounce Rate, n.d.). A higher bounce rate would mean there’s a high percentage of visitors coming to the website and then leaving after only viewing one page. A low bounce rate indicates that there is a lower percentage of visitors that are leaving the website after a short amount of time (What is a Bounce Rate, n.d.). Bounce rates are very informative because if it’s a high bounce rate, we know that there’s a high number of visitors leaving the website and not staying. In the imaginary retailer we created, Good Day, will know the difference if the redesigning the website was the right thing to or knowing if there is more to improve on redesigning. Bounce rates can be extremely informative as it provides this type of analytics which lets the company understand, “mhm this is working better than before” OR “okay, we need to work on this more to decrease bounce rates.”
Unique website visitors are first time visitors to the site for a certain amount of time (Top 8 KPI, 2017). Unique website visitors are determined in different ways such as IP addresses, browser cookies and what browser visitors use (Top 8 KPI, 2017). So using different devices to visit the same website, it’ll be counted as a new unique website visitor. Unique website visitors can help companies look at website traffic over time to see the spikes and lows over a certain period of time. So not just for the online retailer in this example, but any company can find this KPI helpful in order to track website traffic and if they are generating any visitors.
Average time on page is the average amount of time spent on the overall website with all web pages included in that metric (Top 8 KPI, 2017). Similar to bounce rates, but you’ll view the average time as actual time such as minutes. This KPI can be beneficial for our imaginary Good Day retailer and any other retailers as well. The average time spent on pages is typically two to three minutes (Top 8 KPI, 2017). Just for any company or business tracking this specific KPI, seeing a longer session time indicates that users are visiting the website or certain pages longer than the average time spent. This can also indicate that visitors are engaging more with the website.
Key performance indicators are very helpful and essential for organizations to use to help them along the path of marketing success and fulfilling the end goals. Although KPIs are specific metrics and provide data/numbers depending on the specific KPI used, we can use the KPI as a goal which can help any organization to pass that goal. For example, if the average time spent on a page is two to three minutes, the retailer can strive for a longer duration session such as five to ten minutes. In conclusion, key performance indicators may not be the exact path or answer to help organizations reach their goals and succeed marketing campaigns; however, they can be a beneficial guide to succeeding.
Essentially, The hub and spoke method is a great method to organize and break down relationships between different departments such as the departments stated earlier. As stated from the Cult of Analytics textbook, “the hub include people like senior business analysts, technical specialists, data miners, business intelligence people, marketing analysts, web analytics specialists and report directly to someone like a director of analytics who reports directly to the CEO and the executive steering group” (Jackson, 2016, pg. 15). What about spokes? Spokes are on the outside. Spokes are the variety of the business units, areas or competences that the business has to offer (Jackson, 2016, pg. 14). The main duty of the hub is to provide the spokes with any information they need through processes designed to get the make the most of existing tools available (Jackson, 2016, pg. 14). Incorporating all jobs and duties from each departments cohesively, each individual can work towards the overall goal and succeed in order to provide information needed for a campaign and company.
It is important to consider all needs from every department when developing a digital marketing campaign and the value of sharing results across the organization. Without a cohesive organization and department working together, nothing will be organized or get done in the best way it can be done in. Every department has its own duties and plays an important role in the campaign no matter what how little or big the role may be. Each role has a specific duty and role compared to other departments within the campaign.
One may be the programmer who deals with the tech side of a website and understanding the hows and whats when creating a website together. Another role can be the director analytics who oversees everyone and the entire campaign to ensure deadlines are met and jobs are fulfilled. There’s various roles within in a marketing team to track and research data needed to formulate a digital marketing campaign such as marketing manager, content writer, marketing research analyst and etc.
The point is every role has different duties than someone else may have in the IT department or the senior positions. Without one role playing its part or not having the role at all, the campaign may not be as successful as it could have been. We have to consider the needs of every department available because working together can create strengths for everyone and fill in the weakness departments may have.
References:
Jackson, S. (2016). Cult of Analytics. London: Routledge. TextBook.
PepsiCo is an American food and beverage company and is considered to be one of the largest in the world as they have products available in over 200 countries (PepsiCo Inc., n.d.). In 1898, the Pepsi Cola was created by a pharmacist, Caleb D. Bradham in New Bern, North Carolina (PepsiCo, Inch., n.d.). Soon after, the Pepsi Cola beverage reached success in 1902 that Bradham founded the PepsiCo company. Since the founding years, PepsiCo has changed and evolved as trends came by (About the Company, 2020). Due to PepsiCo evolving and adapting, they have incorporated global brands such as Pepsi and Quaker, Gatorade and Tropicana, Frito-Lay and many more (About the Company, 2020). According to the official About the Company page located on the PepsiCo website, “PepsiCo is one of the world’s most-respected companies with products sold in more than 200 countries and territories and 22 brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales.”
I chose PepsiCo for my project mainly because it was the only company from the list given to us that interested me. I buy a variety of products from PepsiCo such as their snacks and drinks so it would make sense to me to create a new product for a brand that I purchase from on a weekly/monthly basis.
In the mornings, I always want a smoothie to start off my day before I go to work. My problem with that is the smoothie place closest to me, Smoothie King, is nearly 20 minutes away from my house and the opposite direction of going to my job in the mornings. Typically, in the mornings I would just go to a gas station, like QT, and buy a juice to start off my day even though I really wanted a smoothie. PepsiCo owns a juice smoothie brand, Naked Juice (Bailey, 2019). Naked Juice sells cold pressed juices and smoothies (Bailey, 2019). I’ve had these drinks a few times but it doesn’t necessarily taste like a smoothie that I crave for every morning. A product that PepsiCo could launch would be a frozen, pre-made smoothie mix packages. With this product, all consumers have to do is take the pack and throw it into a blender for it to turn into a thick smoothie consistency. It would be a nice and easier way for consumers to make smoothies without having to buy fresh fruit and preparing them to make a smoothie whereas pre-made smoothie packs, they can just throw it into a blender to have it ready in minutes.
Starbucks is a company that I believe is socially responsible. Sustainability refers to meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (Grant, 2020). Sustainability needs to consider three various systems that support the triple bottom line: economic, environmental, and social or also known as people, planet, and profit (Grant, 2020). Starbucks has various initiatives that they claim to follow and practice such as waste and recycling reduction, energy conservation, water conservation, showing support for farmers and community, and the ethos water fund (Wang, 2018).
As any other company, there is going to be a waste for different items like plastic, paper, etc. With Starbucks, they work with their respective communities to reduce wastage and make recycling easier (Wang, 2018). They offer a .10 cent discount to customers that provide their own reusable cups to reduce wastage (Wang, 2018). One summer, they held a cup summit where various representatives of plastic and paper value chains came together to discuss a valuable solution for cups (Wang, 2018).
Starbucks fully understands the amount of energy they use, creating 80% of carbon footprint so they work hard to conserve energy (Wang, 2018). As of now, about 20% of the electricity they use in stores from the US and Canada came from renewable sources (Wang, 2018). With Starbucks, they obviously use a massive amount of water to make their drinks, as well as their ice machines and dishwashing (Wang, 2018). Wanting to reduce their water consumption, Starbucks implemented a few number of ways like switching to mechanical dishwashers which use less than a single gallon of water during a cycle (Wang, 2018).
Starbucks consistently shows support for their respective local communities and the farmers (Wang, 2018). They work with farmers hands on to always improve the quality of their coffee and the community (Wang, 2018). Starbucks constantly working with farmers and their community shows a unified community and empowering it as well which ensures quality coffee from the best (Wang, 2018). Starbucks even created the Farmers Support Centers, located in Costa Rica and Rwanda which offers local farmers skills and resources to reduce the overall cost of production while also increasing production and quality (Wang, 2018).
The Ethos Water Fund, created by Starbucks, raises awareness about one billion people around the world that do not have access to clean drinking water (Wang, 2018). All funds go towards providing children around the world with clean drinking water (Wang, 2018). Starbucks also sells Ethos Water bottles in-store (Wang, 2018). Any bottle purchased from Starbucks, a portion of the proceeds go towards the fund (Wang, 2018). Over $6 million has been raised to support the Ethos Water Fund (Wang, 2018).
One issue Starbucks faced when they were being socially responsible was when they banned their plastic straws. Starbucks planned to go straw free and use a sip lid to reduce plastic wastage in the environment (Koman, 2018). Starbucks faced immediate backlash from various disabled activist groups stating that if Starbucks eliminated plastic straws completely, people with disabilities would not be able to or comfortably consume their beverages (Koman, 2018). In response, Starbucks announced they will continue to offer straws to those who may need it as long as it is requested for (Koman, 2018).
I believe that Starbucks is green for the environment and not for profit. From the previous examples given, we can see that Starbucks is trying hard to reduce any type of wastage that can damage the environment. To reduce cup wastage, I always see reusable cups on display at stores that are available for purchase. With Ethos Water, I’ve only seen that brand in-store and nowhere else for purchase. With the world today, we are seeing the world changing, good or bad, Starbucks sees that and understands it so they are genuinely practicing and supporting these claims to better their company and the environment. Even when they face backlash like the straw bans, they still try to practice being socially responsible while keeping their customers happy.
In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission provided over $88 million of refunds to AT&T customers due to third party charges made on their respective bills without their consent (FTC, 2016). Around 2.5 million AT&T customers were affected by these charges and received their refunds after 75 days (FTC, 2016).
In AT&T’s case, they violated the mobile marketing law: mobile cramming. Mobile cramming is a modern version of a long-time scam in which consumers’ phone bills are used as a vehicle for unauthorized charges placed by third parties (Mobile Cramming, n.d.). There were unnecessary charges placed onto millions of customers without their consent (FTC, 2016).
Negative consequences that multiple consumers faced were the unauthorized charges of $9.99 for numerous reasons such as ringtones and text message subscriptions containing love tips, horoscopes, and fun facts (FTC, 2016). According to the Federal Trade Commission’s website about the incident, AT&T kept nearly over 35% of these charges that were made as well.
Using AT&T as an example, the possible penalties levied on companies who violated legal considerations would be obviously repaying their customers of all unauthorized charges placed on his or her’s accounts. This would result in millions of refunds given out to these customers. Another penalty would be the FTC would fine the company. For this example, we can use Facebook. The FTC fined Facebook for $5 billion over privacy issues and violating consumers’ privacy rights (Snider & Baig, 2019).
The kind of actions must a marketer take with any mobile marketing campaign to remain ethical must be to obtain permission from the consumer in order to contact them. Another action that should be taken to remain ethical is with the company/business itself to enforce and prohibiting any type of violations against the mobile marketing laws like mobile cramming, unauthorized access of consumers’ accounts, violating consumers’ privacy rights and many more.
Top dog brands are market leaders or the strongest brands with the largest market shares in their product categories, are the easiest brands to manage because success breeds success (Kardes, n.d.). Under dog brands are also known as follower brands.
Two brands I have chosen to discuss are McDonalds and Burger King. McDonalds and Burger King has had an intense rivalry over the years as both brands sell similar products on their menu and both brands have been considered to be one of the top fast food chains by consumers in the country. According to QSR Magazine, McDonalds is ranked number one for fast food chains for 2018 while Burger King is ranked at number seven. Based off this ranking, we can say that McDonalds is clearly the top dog of their market while Burger King is the under dog.
McDonalds’ top dog brand strategy include two aspects: uniformity and culture awareness (Matthews, 2018) (Kirk, 2018). With uniformity, McDonalds is the same no matter where you go, you will always have the access to the original and famous menu with items like the Big Mac. This is unique to have for a world known fast food brand because consumers in any parts of the world can have the same access and experiencing McDonalds’ popular menu. Burger King’s under dog brand strategy is different compared to McDonalds due to their contrasting brand strategies. Burger focuses more on promoting and selling their products rather than selling an experience compared to McDonalds (Heaton, 2014).
For the underdog to improve its strategy and even surpass the top dog, Burger King can shift their branding strategy back to their original slogan, “have it your way” (Burger King, 2019). I believe this slogan feels more personal and adds more experience for consumers than their new slogan, “be your way” (Burger King, 2019). To surpass their competitor, Burger King should shift their branding and marketing strategy onto their customers for them to have it their way rather than a simple and straight marketing of their products.
I believe that consumers prefer top dog brands over under dog brands mainly because the top dog brands are the market leaders. Typically, these brands would be number 1 in their category or rank extremely high compared to their under dog. It’s a brand that consumers are comfortable with and can trust due to numerous people considering it to be number one. For example, with McDonalds and Burger King, most would prefer McDonalds because its well known and its already considered the market leader for fast food chains and consumers can trust that brand well compared to an under dog despite that they sells similar products.
Brandy Chanthapho 