Unit 19 Marketing Planning Assignment of Superdrugs Store Plc

Program	Diploma in Business
Unit Number and Title	Unit 19 Marketing Planning Assignment of Superdrugs Store Plc
QFC Level	Level 4

Introduction

Marketing Planning Assignment of Superdrugs Store can make out the different strategies with which they can withstand the different blows that will be coming for launching some new launches (Armstrong and Taylor2014). They infact does not moves with the similar mindset with which they have started decades ago even if things remains good with them from the beginning. They are needed to find newer ways with which they can make an increment of their profit and reach out to newer target consumers. For implementation of an or business strategy of marketing, the marketing plan needs to consider a lot many things with the proper implementation of SWOT, PEST and Poster’s Five Forces and a clear understanding of each of this is needed (Brattonand Gold, 2012).
Over years production concept has experienced a lot of evolution along with the concept of ‘one-to-one’ marketing (Flamholtz, 2012). Superdrugs Store Plc. has embarked on this expansion with business and marketing activities across the land of United Kingdoms. The report stands as an analysis producing a detailed report about their new brand launch, their various operational factors as well as marketing activities with which they are imposing their various strategies for their new product launch.

Task 1

Produce a report that addresses the following AC`s

Introduction:

In 1964, Ronal and Peter Goldstein made the inception of Superdrug Store Plc with their year’s knowledge from the industry of grocery retailing. During the year it got incorporated as the ‘Leading Supermarket Ltd.’and continued to strive with its name till date (Mendenhall and Osland, 2012).It is a retailer of Health and Beauty and is the second largest store of UK, standing behind Boots, first largest retailer of United Kingdoms. Since year 2002, this organization is working as a subsidiary of A. S. Watson Group which is again a conglomerate of CK Hutchison Holdings. Storing of sell makeup, fragrance of the widest ranges, baby and mother care with electrical and toiletries, they are now planning to play strategic in terms of bringing more baby care options which they have fixed into ‘baby oil’ (Budhwar and Debrah, 2013).Superdrug Plc is in continuous process of expanding their business and marketing strategy and right now they are hopeful with this baby oil in the worldwide market.During 2014, they celebrated their 50 years of establishment. Along with this celebration they are now changing their marketing strategies to enable more customers in availing their products in more countries besides their existing locators in almost 50 countries.

Body:

Marketing is all about working with the four P’s which manages:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place

Better to understand with a diagram provided below:

Referring to (Alfeset al.2013, p.331), marketing plan is explained as a tool that is of ‘all-purpose’ and enables the marketing management in getting informed about all the things of an organization. It gives an indication to the management about the various things which the management is lacking, how to bring success to the company goals and redefining some newer direction with some newly launched product or the new market against their competitors. Nevertheless it can be said that a better marketing planning must be consisting of consideration which are needed under its head of ‘changing perspectives’.For Superdrugs Store Plc, their marketing has experienced a lot of evolution over time with a strategy mentioning ‘one-to-one marketing’.

SWOT Analysis for SuperdrugsPlc:

Strength	Weakness	Opportunities	Threats
All over UK, Superdrugs stands as no. 2 in offering beauty products	Pharmacies are not in too many numbers within its retail stores	Increment of market exploration have enabled in bringing pharmacy within its retail stores	Strong competition received from competitors like TESCO and Boots
As a retailer that is value oriented it gives a commendable positioning	Tendency towards execution of in-store products	Enhancing its position within the private levels to boost up workforce, cost of newer retail locators and others	Competition increased from supermarkets and discounters
It offers only exclusive brands and popular brands	Male shoppers does not have that much choice in terms of choosing male products
Provides service with digitized media such as internet giving consumers an option to make a quick purchasing

PEST Analysis:

Evaluation ofSupedrugcapability for planning its future marketing activity:

The organizational capability of an organization is defined as the competency of a company alongwith other factors like their strength, weaknesses, synergistic effect, behaviour and resource as well. It actually identifies the organization capacity for using its strength as well as overcoming all the kinds of weaknesses.Henceforth such creates an opportunity in its external environment. For Superdrug Plcthe capabilities of the organization have been mentioned below:

• Core Competence: Offering a brand popularity for over half a decade they are hopeful to get a better consumer feedback
• Creativity and Uniqueness brought down by holding the fingers of the newly appointed Managing Director, Peter Macnab
• Synergistic Effect: After becoming a subsidiary of A K Watson Group the company has arranged a bigger profit at the end of the year. Now under a proper planning, if an effective launching is attained for the baby oil, high chances will be effecting the entire brand
• Global Network: Working for about almost 350 years, globally the company has established a successful network all over the world
• Behaviour and Resources
• High prices
• Weakness
• Product availability
• Worldwide stores
• Recognizable as well as a well-known organization

Uniqueness of Superdrug Plc Baby Oil:

Since 1964 Superdrug Plc is running with the same brand popularity with an increasing development especially to its functional arenas like:

• Marketing operations
• Finance
• Personal management
• General management
• Management of information

For launching baby oil, from the perspective of finance, Superdrug is needed to make proper utilization of their funding alongwith more concern towards the limitations and budget (Jacksonet al. 2014). From the Marketing View they are needed to grow their brand awareness and consider the factors with which they can increase their capabilities of marketing in terms of its price, place, promotion and product as well. Additionally they are required to maintain a brand loyalty with which enhancement of the sales turnover would get maintained.

Examine techniques for organisational auditing:

Essentially it is required to understand the consumers and target users for baby oil since it stands as the key necessity of ‘marketing’ planning. The marketing planning would be consisting of analysing and auditing of the external that is marketing environmental and organizational or internal environment. Such will be encompassing accumulation of the appropriate factors and then making an analysis of the same. The categories of ‘relevant factors’ which are actually the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors have been discussed below:

Internal:-

• Objectives and Mission of the company for launching baby oil
• The customers who are existing including their satisfactions, expectations, dissatisfactions and relationships of some particular product
• Resources of the company which is composed of information and finance with a management structure
• A relationship established between partner, staff and funders of capital

External:-

• Political, Economic, Social and Technological considerations that are included under the acronym of  PEST
• Strength, Weaknesses,Opportunities and Threats, the acronym of SWOT analysis. It helps in the analysis of the company culture as well as situation that may arise in the near future and assessment of external environment
• For the prospective customers using baby oil, it is required to make an analysis of their requirements, behaviour, motivations, locations, and reason of  purchasing
• A market that consists of an awareness about the size of the market, its growth, distributions, price, development of product and its promotion

Carry out organisational auditing:

Generally the SWOT analysis commonly is used for carrying out the auditing of an organization along with an analysis of its several external factors. The abbreviation of Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, SWOT moves with anintention of analysing opportunities and strength,and taking advantage of the entire market, who are using the baby oil, how frequent they are in purchasing of that particular product for their babies and more (Kehoe et al. 2013, p.367). Meanwhile it also minimizes all kinds of weakness of an organization and cuts down the threats too.

Assess the main barriers to marketing planning:

Marketing Planning consists of a sequential logic of events which the organizations have adopted for defining the objectives of baby oil marketing.It can be said that it is one of the most complicated exercises which invariably all companies encounter in terms of the several barriers while implementing a marketing plan. The types of barriers have been discussed below:

• Behavioural Barriers
• Cognitive Barriers
• Cultural Barriers
• Environmental Barriers
• Resources
• Systems and Processes

A strong planning for marketing and its strategies essentially remains a key component for all organizations.  However, certain barriers are therefor marketing planning. For instance,

• Lacking of the perfect motivation for bringing change: If a stakeholder is of no mood or is demotivated and don’t want to hold any opportunities that are emerging, the primary barrier would take place (Honget al. 2012).
• Being overconfident about the problems or its solutions: Overconfidence might be causing an inappropriate solution towards some problems.
• No achieving the expected cooperation with the management: If the Financial department and HR do not want to share their own goals and resources between each other, marketing effort might be impaired.
• Lack of skills and knowledge: Without proper skill and knowledge, a marketing plan would have its worst effect.

Almost all the marketing plan barriers are interdependent to each other. An improper system may lead to a bad plan which will be leading to cash hindrance and reduced sales. This in turn may prevent in taking any awareness towards getting an improved skill with development of a better system. Lacking of sufficient funding may give rise to an inefficient system.

Conclusion:

Implementation of STP (Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning) can have its biggest effect over cutting down the barriers which an organization may come up in its longest run. 

The most effective ways of segmenting audience include:

• Demographic: The marketing strategy is needed to breakdown taking any combination like gender, age, education, income, residence type or by their occupational setting (Muethelet al. 2012). For Superdrugs baby oil promotion, it targets to the mothers who are in search of the best care for their infants in terms of safety and budget (Nickson2013).
• Psychographics: For drawing a sketch about the marketing strategies, Superdrugs have applied a procedure of 
• Interviews: Talk to the mothers who are actually using the baby oil. In-depth interview will be enabling the company in getting a view about the many health benefits which they are looking for and that too within a strict budget
• Survey: With this option the company has ably reached to more number of baby product consumers enabling an insightful answer to their every queries
• Customer Data: The marketing team is needed to make a rigorous search about the graph of purchase and what is the curve of brand purchasing. Such a data will be getting used for generating an insight about the significance of the product and how mothers are interested towards getting that very brand.

Task 2:

Carry out organisational auditing and analysis of external factors using PEST or SWOT or Porter’s Five Forces

For both the large or small scale industries, effectively carrying out business management is equally difficult. And here the organization needs a sound knowledge about assessment of the competitive environment. Superdrugs Store Plchas appropriately engaged managers and entrepreneurs in comprehending a competitive environment for launching and stabling a brand popularity of the baby oil. In terms of analysis they make use of SWOT for internal assessment, PEST for external assessment and PORTER’s Five Forces for assessing both (Renwick et al. 2013).

SWOT Analysis:

Strengths	A strong team for research and development
	Offering a more safe baby oil which will enhance the product usability with the baby’s well-being (Jianget al. 2012)
	Costs low henceforth giving a chance to every mothers of all class to check its efficacy
	Across the country a process of strong marketing and branding
Weaknesses	Till date they have failed to give themselves the position of functioning globally
	Consumers are only based from United Kingdoms because of the lack of brand popularity
Opportunities	Making an expansion to the other countries besides having flourished in UK
	Making an increment to the product portfolio of baby oil and giving it an option of becoming multi-brand for its consumers
Threats	Low cost should not be enablingin selection of low quality products since it will be getting applied to an infant’s body Facing a strong competition from each of the global brands particular those from the baby product sellers

Porter’s Five Forces:

Supplier Power	For the competitive force this acts as one of the major players with which the bargaining power gets increased a lot
Buyer Power	Boosting up the customer loyalty will certainly enhance a reduction to the power of the baby oil consumer where they would be getting rewarded with the right kind of product for their kids
Threat of New Entrants	In the baby product industry too many entrants have started seizing the market giving a tough competition to the existing ones. For example, ‘thewholesaler’ is imposing several strategic plans in terms of launching diverse baby products posing a real threat for the organization to stand for in the long run

PEST Analysis

Political	Nature of change	Impact	Opportunities	Threats	Strategic Response
	Strict regulation on the quality of the baby oil	Several groups conducted a study on the examination of application of this body oil on the infants skin and its various effects which can be only remaining fruitful for the baby	Opportunities of bringing a satisfying effect over the kids skin so as to allowing them happy all the timewith an protection to their healthiness	Strict awareness to the quality checker of the product in order to take a look on the oil quality so that after application their skin does not irritate with skin rashes	Need to be organic No preservatives should be present Should be enriched with Vitamins D and E

 

The analysis is needed to entail in thinking about how all these above mentioned analysis will be affecting the business. The company is needed to make an identification of the strength of each of the forces. Attaining such, Superdrugs will be ably making an analysis of their business strength and the position worldwide.

 ANSOFF Matrix:

• Market penetration, situated at the left lower quadrant of the diagram remains the safest among its other four quadrants. Here the company will be focussing on the expansion of the body oil sale within the baby product market.
• Product development on the other hand will be enabling the company in facing the different threats about launching a newer product and competing with the other brands which is already in the market for years or might be of decades.
• Market development enables the organization in checking the market trend with some product which is already excelling in the existing market
• Diversification is concluded as the riskiest quadrant where the company will be venturing with some products with which they are infact challenging their skill with the other giant’s names in the baby product industry (Jacksonet al. 2014, p.4).

Conclusion

A new baby product is going to be launched by the Superdrugs Store Plc. for which a market analysis has been made in the report. The company offers an access to it’s all the varieties of its brand enabling consumers to avail such and give a try all their lifelong. With their new launch of baby oil they are actually increasing their horizon of commitment with a role of standing responsible towards the society. Offering almost 800 stores all across the world with a strength of almost 14,000, they are standing high with their promise of striving and providing the best.

Referencing

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