Case Study: Promoting an Indian Masala Brand

A popular spice manufacturing company “Fire Spice” plans to do promotion in the Indian Market. The company has never spent enough money on advertisements. The company now plans to give competition to MDH Masala, Badshah Masala and Everest Masala. The company appoints you as the Marketing Head of the organisation.

How will you promote the brand “Fire Spice” in the Indian Market? Explain at least five promotion mix techniques with detailed explanation.

The promotional mix is the essence of the making of the product and the ever-increasing boundaries of a sphere of influence of a particular product. Marketers use the promotional mix which is a blend of five promotional variables which in turn has a huge impact on the sales and brand awareness of a particular product. A better promotion mix allows the product to gain leverage against its market competition. So, let us assess the ‘Promotion Mix’ for the given product called 'Fire Spice.'

Target Market:
Before directly focusing on a promotional mix, we need to define our target market first. The target market is the segment of the society or masses who need your product or services. So, we need to carry out an extensive marketing research to understand the demographics, behavior patterns, their attitudes, and needs of individuals. Using all the relevant data we have collected, we need to paint a picture of our ideal customer, their locations, their ability to buy the product and most importantly their expectation from the product.
  • Now the customers for the Fire Spice will be mostly the middle-class people who are usually the loyal customers of their usual brand.
  • As we are competing with established brands like MDH Masala, Badshah Masala, and Everest Masala, we should strategize and come up with a strong USP (Unique selling point). It can either be the quality of spices, standard pricing or exciting offers.
  • The target group is mostly of the women who partake in the activities like cooking in a country like India and who spend most of their time in the kitchen. This target group prefers to use a quality masala and certainly give more impetus to a healthy discount or 'Buy One Get One Free' offer.
Advertising:
It is the most basic and the most important stage in the promotion mix. It is an any paid form of media communication. We can go for Offline as well as an Online method of advertisement. We can post our ads in newspaper and magazines. Most of the people, especially our prime target customers, the women can be found shopping in the supermarket. We can advertise our product by distributing flyers in a supermarket.     
Let us consider the option of using Google PPC for Online advertisements. We can also make a proper use of social media channels. Using Facebook and Twitter can be a crucial step to communicate with an enormous chunk of potential customers. We can advertise our product based on our USP which says, ‘Authentic taste with healthy discounts.’ We can post the photos, videos and in interactive blog posts on social media channels to attract the attention of the readers. Furthermore, we can use Facebook to create various contents such as quiz contests or ‘Caption This’ content where we can gift our products to the content winners. The radio and television ads during a prime time play a crucial role. The ads should be run on the channels and programs when our female target group is there to consume the content. Every single competitor of ours has a running jingle which has become the identity of their business. We should invest finances as well as efforts to come up with our own.
Public Relations:
Public relation techniques will help us to build goodwill towards our product by increasing the value and image in public’s eye. Public relation is not just dealing with the negative publicity, but it is majorly gaining the positive attention from the community.
  • We can run PR campaigns for our product using the massive media coverage for our grand opening and product launching ceremony. Let the people know that we are building something innovative to let people eat whatever they want and maintain their health at the same time.
  • We can take part in various events, community activities and place our products in exhibitions, where we can present and advocate our product to the highly targeted customers.
  • We can promote our product with press releases and newsletters to make people understand how we have found the perfect masala combination to bring the authentic taste of Indian cuisines. Also, how we are operating on the emancipation of lower class women in the rural areas by offering them jobs in our manufacturing facilities.
  • Use our social media channels to engage with a huge customer pool to retain our loyal customers and to gain new ones. Promote the product while letting people know about our work for the social causes. Our job offerings to the needy women and donations for the girl child education and much more.
  • Tie up with bloggers and professional chefs to endorse our product on their blogs and cooking shows.
Sales Promotion
Who doesn’t love extra incentives or discounts? A customer’s purchasing decision gets changes if a company is adding something extra or giving a high discount on their product. We can motivate our clients to buy our products.
  • We can offer a massive discount for first 500 buyers within a given timeframe.
  • Provide a mutually beneficial Masala combo offers to purchase products. Let them try our every single product with 'Buy One Get One' offer.
  • Professionally network with other relevant businesses and offer exclusively free products such as kitchen sets, scrub pad, cash prizes, food items, etc.
  • We can provide guaranteed free delivery for bulk orders.
Direct Marketing
It is the method of advertising where we can communicate with our potential customers in a more personalized way than our usual advertising methods. We can imply the following methods for direct marketing,
  • We can choose the slots and channels based on our target market and advertise our product on radio and television.
  • You can send them letters or just calling them can be profitable. We can employ the telemarketing, email marketing, mailing coupons & catalogs methods.
  • We should tie with multimedia channels on TV, bloggers, Youtube vloggers, the cooking show producers and any e-commerce websites where we can promote and sell our products easily.
Personal Selling
Let us also incorporate the human touch into advertising and selling our product. Our sales people can work on informing, persuading and remind our customers about our product. We can use our research data and create a list of potential buyers in a particular area.
  • An order getter sales person can engage with clients and promote our product. Their persuasion methods can help us to win over customers.
  • An order taker salesperson works passively and waits for the customers to find them from the advertisements and get the product from them.
  • Our sales person can go to the interested buyer's houses and give them a free demo of our products.

So, if this promotional mix is executed smartly and with a passion towards growth, the ‘Fire Spice’ can easily get a huge competitive advantage over other competitors in the market. Our primary motive of creating a promotional mix is to convince the clients the excellent customer experience which they are expecting before buying the product. We can achieve this by wisely using our promotional tools and creative client-oriented promotional campaigns.

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