Case Study of a Marketing Strategy in action

We’ve been sharing different business strategies and experiences ever since this blog started. This week we want to do something new, which could further add value to you and your business – we are going to analyzing an actual case study of a past project. Depending on the response, we will do some case studies on a regular basis, to show how we actually put our strategy into practice.

This project involves a Japanese health drink containing vitamin C, sufficient to our daily intake. The drink has a unique, slightly sour flavor and absolutely new to the Hong Kong market. Pricing was HK$ for a 125ml bottle, considered to be expensive relatively to its size. The budget for the launch was also modest and precluded TV as a launch medium.

On doing some research we found out that the Hong Kong market was saturated with soft drinks and health drinks, from many countries, making it difficult to stand out.

We needed to carefully identify our aims and our target market so as to find and create a corporate strategy that would bring the attention of our ‘vitamin C’ drink to the market; while creating short term sales and building a long term brand image – all on a limited budget.

Firstly, we needed to specify a market – we know everyone drinks soft drinks, healthy drinks, but there is always a segment of the market that has a major influence on the sale of a product. Finding it was the first step. In this case we identified our segment as:

Target Market:
Single women, born in the 80s, with incomes of between $15k - 25k

The next step is how to reach that segment – and the final step is the message and how are we going to deliver the message.

Strategy:
Due to our limited budget, we decided to focus on our primary target, single women in their 20s and early 30s, with $15 – 25 k income levels. How do we reach them? Our idea was to use women’s fashion and gossip magazines as a supporting medium and spend the major portion of our budget on creating a demand for the product through sampling, as the product had a unique and refreshing taste (shown by research of sampling testing with people from our target group.

Therefore, our overall strategy was to create a demand for the product amongst our selected target group, by providing a drink that was tasting and healthy, at a relatively high price that would make her feel special and self-indulgent.

Our target being young women who are able and willing to spend on their quality lifestyle such as spa, hairstyle, facial and slimming treatment; this in itself led to the idea of how to reach them – by placing sample bottles of the health drink in salons, spas and gymnasiums.

This type of woman is also most likely to try new product - especially if it’s good for her or makes her feel good about herself. Therefore our strategy included and the message “a drink that’s not for everyone. It’s made just for you”. This would then become a guideline for use in all future public relations, sales promotion and literature.

Public Relations:
We can started by submitting the following:

1.) articles about drinks that containing daily intakes of vitamin C, to health columns in Daily and Fashion/Gossip publications
2.) articles about the advantages of Vitamin C beauty publications
3.) writing a “beauty” blog on the company website, and giving out beauty tips

Sales Promotion:
Give out free drinks in hair/beauty salons, outlets such as health clubs, gyms and so on. This draws the attention of the customer and keeps them longer in such outlets thereby increasing the chances of spending more money.

Distribution Places:
Apart for Hair, Spas and Beauty salons we have mentioned before, department store such as Sogo and CitySuper, convenient stores such as 7-11, K-mart and others.

The above ideas formed the basis of our strategy to launch a health drink in Hong Kong, on a limited budget and which would meet a given short-term sales target while building a brand, long-term. Of course there are alternative way to launch a similar product, but this was our idea for a strategy which would work, be different (therefore stand-out from the competition) work on a limited budget.

Therefore we would like to hear from you: your comments, your ideas. Do you think this strategy would work, do you have any comments? Do you have thoughts on what strategy you would have used, or do you have any similar experiences you could share with us? We would be happy to give you our suggestion on strategies you have used in the past or alternatively, if you are looking for ideas on strategies for a specific purpose.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The AsiaMarketing team.