Know Your Target Customers: Subaru Thrives in Great Profit in Great Recession

Positioning a product to target certain market requires a great deal of diligence. A marketer starts by selecting a market as her target, taking into consideration of the company’s vision, product fit, competitive landscape and its winning roadmap. Once the target market is decided, the marketer examines the needs, wants and demands of the target customers at multiple dimensions and decides how it creates, communicates and delivers value to its target customers. By courting financially solid buyers with a taste for the quirky, tiny Subaru of America sped through 2009, logging record sales and market share along the way. Last year Subaru became the 11th most popular U.S. auto brand, up from No. 19 just a year earlier. Record sales in cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, and Orlando helped make Subaru the fastest-growing mass-market car brand in the U.S. for the last two years. It's the growth leader again so far in 2010 — up 41 percent through April. For the first time, its unit sales exceed those of such better-known brands as BMW, Lexus, Mazda, and Volkswagen…


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Targeting Different Markets with Different Products: Starbucks Rebranded Seattle's Best Coffee

Prudent marketers understand that customers have diverse needs and wants and, therefore, products have to be positioned to target selected customer segment(s). What if a business wants to take market share beyond its target segment(s)? Starbucks has saturated the market that it currently occupies, showing stagnant demand. In an attempt to drive future growth, the company is brewing a fresh image for Seattle’s Best Coffee, a specialty brand it acquired in 2003. The coffee giant last month kicked off a rebranding effort, which includes a simpler, more contemporary logo and design. It hopes to grow Seattle’s Best into a billion-dollar business by expanding it to fast-food channels, convenience stores, drive-through restaurants and even vending machines this fall. Rebranded Seattle’s Best Coffee is positioned as a premium set of products, which will be complementary to and not competing against the low-cost coffee products currently carried by those marketing channels…


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Can You Describe Your Business in a Few Words?

If you ask people what their businesses are or sit in a presentation, you will likely to find that many companies have hard time to describe their business. People often try to cover every area of their businesses’ expertise, all of their industry experience and each qualification they have attained in an effort to paint the full picture of what makes them stand out. Consequently, the messages are diluted, sounding like everyone else, and audience is confused. A process of distilling the essence of your business from various aspects is mind-wrenching. What you gain from going through the process, however, are a crystal-clear understanding of the business in your own mind and clean, exciting message in the minds of your customers and staff. Meredith Vaughan, president of Vladimir Jones, introduces her agency as “an agency of exciting minds.”


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Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency

Consumer brands can earn social currency. Launching promotional campaign using social media is, however, just the beginning. Effective social media campaigns are achieved by acting upon five key fundamental themes: 1) advocates trump followers – building promotions around turning real people into online celebrities and then endorsers; 2) the social context during consumption matters – creating relevance in consumer's daily life; 3) not every brand should be social – distinguishing those which can have upside in social currency, 4) social tools are a means, not an end – converting viewers into evangelists; and 5) gimmicks marginalize trust – focusing on present true values to consumers…


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CVS Goes Upmarket

As businesses reach a plateau, firms often conduct out-of-box thinking and look for more growth opportunities. One of the common choices is switch to more profitable market segments. By moving from “Always Low Price” to “Save Money Live Better,” Walmart Stores, Inc. seems to have difficulties in its journey for its upmarket repositioning and the company has a lot to learn from Target Corp. Incidentally, drug store CVS was also on the journey to go upmarket. After failed to lure the makers of pricey cosmetics, skin care, and fragrances to offer their products to the drugstore giant, CVS decided to create a brand new retail environment that would be adjacent to its core pharmacies yet offer a totally different shopping experience - Dubbed Beauty 360…


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Wal-Mart, Deviating from Its Fundamental Strategy, Suffered Negative Same-Store Growth

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has seen better days. Yes, profits rose 22%, to $4.63 billion, in the fourth quarter of '09. Even coming out of the Great Recession, many consumers are trading down to shop at the discount superstore. However, for the third straight quarter the store saw negative same-store sales growth; during the last three months of 2009, same-store sales dropped 2%. Overall traffic in Wal-Mart stores was down too…


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iPad for Enterprise?

My students at University of Washington are fascinated by customer perception. If customer perception is more or less mysterious to you as well, take a look at that of iPad. It is supposed to be about web surfing, email and photo and movie watching experience for consumers, according to Apple’s promotion campaign. Customers, however, want a stretch – taking it into an enterprise product category. With over 150,000 applications already produced and much more on the way, customers’ “wrong” perception has a pretty good chance to be proven right…


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