When marketing a product, it is important to constantly monitor and adapt the marketing strategy to ensure improvment of the product performance in the market. One of the ways to ensure proper adaptation, a proper analysis must be conducted every so often.
When working on our Pharmasim simulation, we came to a point where we needed to use a strategy revision to reanalyze different areas of our marketing strategy. The first thing we did was to perform another up-to-date situation analysis. This allowed us to see what areas of our strategy were working to plan and which areas still needed improvement.
From this analysis, we performed a SWUFT analysis that showed us our strengths, weaknesses, favorable trends, and unfavorable trends. We were able to map out in an organized fashion Allround and Allround + products in the cold medecine market. We had quite a lot of strengths including increasing brand awareness, increase in revenues, high satisfaction, strong unit sales, and other helpful areas. We did realize that there was improvement in areas such as our MEI, capacity utilization, and better allocation in sales force, promotion, and advertising. Taking all of these elements into consideration, along with the analysis of the market trends, we were then able to sort out our key issues, our goals and objectives, and finally our new revisions and implementations.
After all of the instrumental revisions made, we came to the conclusion that there were areas that we were performing well with, and there were certainly areas of the strategy that we needed to change in order to gain more success in the market. Those areas where we saw success were our areas of channel sales. With grocery store sales leading the market and chain and independent drug stores falling close behind, we know that is why were finding an increase in our manufacturer sales. These areas, along with a healthy inclusion in other weaker channels allowed an increase in our sales. Shopping habbits are a good correlation to base these choices off of, and for that we found success. Another area we saw fit to capitalze on was the push strategy for our prodcuts. These had been proven successful by our brand awareness and again manufacturer sales.
As said before, the analysis and revision also made us aware of areas to improve on. These areas we found needing improvement were our cost of goods sold and our promotional allowances. Because we couldn't control the plant expansion implemented in periods 3-7, it increased our costs. But the production costs led into our COGS which was starting to eat at our overall net income. Better allocation in our promotional allowances, which we noticed to be above industry average and increaseing, was also a factor that was cutting into our net income. we needed to make better decisions in these areas so that these issues didn't end up translating into negative factors down the road. Better allocation in terms of our promotion, advertising, and hopefully cost of goods sold (though we couldn't directly control it), should have allowed us to gain a more appropriate response from our customers, thus correlating to higher sales, bigger profits, and better market share for Allstar Brands.
The strategy revision was a very helpful process. It opened our eyes up to areas that we wouldn't have seen as causing possible problems in the future. It also showed us where we doing the right things, and where we may have been over/under estimating on our initial marketing strategy. If you are ever marketing a product, or multiple products for a company for that matter, a strategy revision is essential to ensure effective and successful management of a marketing strategy. Marketing managers must certainly take advantage of this process.
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