Target Market Strategy
Introduction
‘ Strategy ‘ may be the most important term in the marketing, management, leadership and economics academic disciplinary. Strategy plays significant roles in helping an organization achieve its goals, from the very beginning of the planning, designing and developing products and until the last steps in the customer-feedback analysis. Marketers are looking at the most efficient approaches in today’s extremely vibrant and complicated company settings that can assist them achieve competitive benefits and compete with their market counterparts. This piece of research paper presents a fictitious product, called E-walker, and examines how STP strategy would help the company enter the markets and thus to achieve marketing success.
E-Walker to Meet Emerging Needs of New Generation
Today’s market is dominated by large numbers of electronics and computerized or digitized products. Electronic shoes and slippers seem to be a very new idea to such a marketing concept. The electronic shoes and slippers from the E-Walker, a private limited company located in California, will be the extremely amazing experience to the new generation sports men and the general public.
Today’s business is technology-driven. E-Walker is planning to campaign its brand name as ‘E-Walker’ for its products. The company is planning to invest good amounts in research and develop in order to find how effectively and strategically it can integrate micro-computer and software to shoes and slippers, so that, the new generation sports men and the general public would be able to enjoy their walks.
It’s truly going to be computerized shoes or slippers in everyone’s foots. The microcomputer chips attached to these shoes or slippers can automatically measure one’s walk-distances, count his footsteps, measure his blood-pressure in foots, compute the speed of a sportsman etc. E-Walker will attract indoor players like badminton and tennis because it can electronically track one’s footsteps and outdoor players like cricket and football due to that it can help players boost up their sports-ability through the digitized system it has been attached with.
E-Walker would offer its products to both sports and footwear suppliers. Sports shoes and other shoes and slippers will be designed and developed differently, and therefore, it will be more economical for the company to use different supply chains to market them. Sports shoes will be supplied to sports suppliers. Other shoes and slippers will be supplied to general footwear suppliers.
STP Strategy to Enter the Markets and Barrier to it:
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Segmentation strategy of E-Walker
As Bygrave and Zacharakis (2010, p. 170) noted, segmentation is a company’s basic marketing dimension for setting the strategic framework and is the key to marketing process of identifying the right customers of the company as well. For effective marketing, it should segment its market by breaking down the total market into sub-groups like geographical, demographic, psychographic and behavioral etc (Lancaster and Reynolds, 2001, p. 68).
As far as E-Walker is concerned, the company has to conduct researches about various needs and wants of the customers. The company thus needs to understand how technology can meet the individual requirements of people as well as sportsmen. The company would propose to segment the market into four, they are e-shoes for sportsmen, e-shops for the general public, e-slippers for sports men and e-slippers for the general public.
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Targeting Strategy
Marketers normally target a group of people or organizations by designing and implementing a marketing mix so that the company will be able to meet the specific needs of that group (Lamb, Hair and McDaniel, 2008, p. 220). As and when a specific market or group of people in that market are targeted, marketing mix elements like product, price, promotion, and place can be developed according to the specific requirements, behavior and expectations of the people in that group. In targeting the market, as Ferrell and Hartline (2008, p. 178) explained, the marketer can adopt any of various targeting methods. They are, 1) selective targeting, 2) single segment strategy, 3) product specialization, 4) Mass-marketing etc.
When it comes to E-Walker, the company would target people who are interested in sports and are fond of electronics or digitized systems. Similarly, the company will target the same kind of groups from the general public as well. Then E-Walker will select selective targeting so that it will have to explore each segment’s demands thoroughly and design and create the shoes and slippers accordingly.
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Positioning Strategy
Kerin, Hartley, and Berkowitz (2005, p. 64) indicated that a positioning strategy always enables the marketer to communicate to potential clients in a very easy and clear manner their distinctive points of difference in relation to their products. The positioning strategy comprises of three items, identifying a set of potential competitive benefits, choosing the correct competitive advantage and selecting an general positioning approach (Armstrong and Kotler, 2005, pp. 208-209) and then communicating the stance selected to the market.
E-Walker proposes to use various communication channels for its advertising, mainly with integrated marketing communication, in order to convey positioning messages to its customers. Positioning strategy is closely related to how effectively the company can achieve sustainable competitive advantages.
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Barriers to entering the markets
Competition will be the primary obstacle to market entry and dominance, but this can be managed and the hazards connected with strong competition can be removed if the STP strategy has been designed and established efficiently.
STP Strategy for Success
Segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) are perhaps the most important three elements in marketing. A marketer would be able to design and integrate the four market-mix elements, namely product, price, promotion and place only once he plans, designs and develop the segmentation, targeting and positioning. The marketing department of the company believes that it will succeed in marketing because the segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy will certainly help it achieve sustainable competitive advantages.
Conclusion
This piece of the research paper has presented a fictitious company named E-Walker and described how successfully it can dominate the market through STP strategy. This paper has highlighted that segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy is extremely critical to success because it is basic key element even to plan and design marketing mix elements.
References
- Armstrong, G and Kotler, P 2005, Marketing: An Introduction, Seventh Edition, Prentice-Hall, Pearson Education, Inc.
- Bygrave, W. D and Zacharakis, A, (2010), Entrepreneurship, Second edition, John Wiley and Sons
- Ferrell, O.C and Hartline, M.D (2008), Marketing Strategy, Fourth edition, Cengage Learning
- Kerin, RA, Hartley, SW and Berkowitz, EN 2005, Marketing, Eighth edition, The McGraw Hill Companies
- Lamb, C.W, Hair, J. F and McDaniel, J. C (2008), Essentials of Marketing, Sixth edition, Cengage Learning
- Lancaster, G and Reynolds, P ( 2001), Marketing: the one-semester introduction, Illustrated edition, Butterworth-Heinemann