In order to succeed in a marketing activities, a marketing strategy is must have. This paper discusses how to go about developing a marketing strategy for organic milk products. It also outlines the target market for the products, a value proposition for the products through differentiation and marketing positioning strategy for the same products.
Introduction
Marketing refer to the activities and approaches that an entrepreneur or business organization carries out in order to make potential customers aware of their products, persuade them to buy and continue using them. Effective marketing will entail letting people know about your products and services repeatedly. In order to do this in a way that will ensure success, developing a marketing strategy will be the starting point (Amstrong & Kotler, 2009).
Explain the components of a marketing strategy
The first step in developing a marketing strategy for organic milk is by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the business. When this is done one is able to take advantage of the strengths and downplay the weaknesses. This is done by developing a SWOT analysis where the strengths and weaknesses; opportunities and threats are reviewed. The strengths of organic milk business include: unique product features of being a healthy drink with recommended daily nutrients for all age groups; personal service and flexible service; and quality milk products.
Weaknesses include low employee skills, wide geographical area, and limited financial resources.
Opportunities include anticipated recovery from recession; growth in demand for healthy beverages; use of internet to reach customers in a wide geographical area; high demand for organic products and government policy of increasing agricultural land devoted to organic farming.
Threats include increased competition, regular milk provide an attractive alternative and lack of sufficient supply of raw milk.
The second step is market segmentation. Due to the need to identify the market in which to concentrate in, this stage is important to every business. It allows focusing the limited marketing resources to potential customers. This involves identifying the needs of particular groups of the market for organic milk through research. After they are identified, the marketing activities will focus on addressing them more successfully than my competitors. In this stage the strength of the business in production of high quality unique milk products that will match the needs for the same for particular group.
The third step is writing a marketing plan, which will entail writing down the already made decisions and research done above. This helps to lay down the actions needed to achieve the things outlined in the strategy and allocate resources for the same in order to achieve the business goals. The marketing plan formulates objectives which are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based).
Fourth step is making a decision on approaches to reach the market. This entails choosing the channels to reach the market, which will be through health food stores, supermarket chains, natural foods supermarkets, convectional supermarkets, superstores, super centers and independent coffee stores. The choices made here affect the communication approaches we use to create awareness of the product. The communication channels for organic milk will include advertising in the media, online, point of sale and use of social networking sites such as facebook. These are dictated by the target groups for the milk (Dimitri & Venezia, 2007).
The last step is measuring and refining the progress. This involves tracking the effectiveness of the marketing strategy in order to review the performance and learn from it. This will be done through various mechanisms. One of these will be asking every new customer the business acquires how they learnt about organic milk brands and asking them to rate the product. Another way will be conducting a marketing research on organic milk in general and carrying out anonymous online surveys in websites such as www.zoomerang.com (Amstrong & Kotler, 2009).
The Target Market
The target market for this range of organic products is as follows:
- Children (4-8 years)
These are young and very active and therefore require a lot of energy which is found in this range of organic milk products.
- Children (9-18 years)
These also are very active and require energy. Organic milk contains daily requirements for calcium which this age group requires 800-1300mg per day
- Adults between 27-49 years
These need a lot of energy, which should be from healthy food products such as organic milk. Most work from their desks which require less movement and therefore a healthy and safe drink is appropriate such that they will not gain unnecessary weight. Contain high Conjugated Linokeic Acids which contain good fats associated with reduced heart diseases. These will be college or post college graduates with middle level income of at least $70,000 per annum (Dimitri & Venezia, 2007).
Value Proposition with Differentiation
ABC Foods process various food items derived from organic milk under the label of Azure Organic brand. These include packed plain milk preserved through UHT treatment. There are also the Azure Yoghurt brands of organic strawberry, chocolate and tropical fruits. Azure Cheese is another product that is produced by ABC foods. There is also the Azure Butter and Azure Spreads, Which are made and preserved without use of any chemicals (Havaldar, 2005).
Market positioning
This entails choosing how target consumers see ABC Foods and Azure Organic brands. ABC foods will use consumer benefits concept where the Azure brands will be promoted and priced on the basis of the benefits they offer to target market that is high quality products with medium prices that are affordable to majority of the majority of the population (Havaldar, 2005).
Conclusion
Effective marketing will entail letting people know about your products and services repeatedly which can be done with the aid of a marketing strategy. This helps to outline the target market, value proposition with differentiation and choose a market positioning strategy.
References
Amstrong, G., Kotler, P. (2009). Marketting: An Introduction. Upper Saddle River. Prentice Hall.
Dimitri, C & Venezia, K. M. (2007). Retail and Consumer Aspects of the Organic Milk Market. USDA. Web.
Havaldar, K. K. (2005). Industrial Marketing. Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd. Web.