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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Microsoft Office for Free?

Two years ago, I wrote to a Microsoft executive, urging the company to offer Microsoft Office for free. The idea is to deliver an online version of Office and provide links to highly relevant online information on the interface using user’s context for automatic search. Given customers’ concern with privacy, the most likely early adopters would be enterprise users who need to gather information from intranet. According to an IDC report, Microsoft has made a progress in this regard and the company is going to offer to corporate customers web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free early this year...


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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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Is Nexus One's Rocky Start a Product of Google's New Approach?

Initial sales figure of Google’s Next One was not impressive. It was significantly lower than that of iPhone 3GS, Droid, and My Touch 3G. But Nexus One definitively is trying to be a different method of distribution, one done only by Google and directly to end users…


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