Marketing Positioning

Chipotle has a very simple product line-up offering tacos, burritos and salads. However, it offers up to 65000 combinations of ingredients for customers to choose while assembling the product. The product ingredients, sourcing and preparation are important for Chipotle w.r.t. customer experience and perceptions about the brand. There is however, no difference in product line-up when compared to direct competitors like Qdoba.

Howard Moskowitz, a food industry consultant, detailed how to increase the flavor appeal of Dr. Pepper by its consumers, with large amounts sugar. In Prego spaghetti sauce, after tomatoes, sugar was made the next greatest ingredient in amount. The classic Lay’s potato chip brand included many different flavors such as chips with salt & vinegar, salt & pepper, cheddar, and sour cream flavoring. Mr. Moss goes on to describe how Frito-Lay executives hope to develop “designer sodium,” which may decrease the sodium content of their products by a considerable

Takis, the perfect amount of spicy, crunchy, and flakiness. According to "Takis/ Detailed Statistics," more than 4,457 people become fans of Takis in one month. One article written by Tracie Lee from Seriousseats.com said "Holy sweet Jesus, it was everything I wanted out of a snack. It has the strong corn flavor that comes through on Fritos, but it's much more complex and satisfying with the addiction of sour lime and a big kick of spicy chile at the end." The very first time I tried Takis, I fell in love. I immediately wanted to finish the rest of the bag. I then continued to eat a bag every other day even though I knew it wasn't healthy. My friends and i used to argue about which chips were the best, either Hot Cheetos or Takis. Honestly Takis are some of the best chips I have ever had, just the way the chile rubs off as soon as you take a bite out of them or how you can hear the crunch while you chew, or even the knock of lime that appears after the first bite. Takis have almost everything someone could possibly want in a chip. They just have a certain taste and texture that makes

Popchips is a chip brand who claim their chip is a healthy snack. Popchips claimed that they do not use any flavor enhancer, no added preservatives, no fake flavors, and no synthetic colors. Their product use all-natural ingredients from non-GMO sources (Faq). This particular ad created by Popchips used a bright red color that brings the audience’s eyes to attention. The ad is divided into three sections. The top section writes “less guilty, more pleasure.” Three stacks of potato chips at different height are in the middle of the page. An enormous “100 calories” laid behind the three potato chip stacks. Below each stack is the names of chip types including: fried chips, kettle style chips, and Popchips. Underneath the names are short nutrition facts of the chips. The bottom section depicts a short description of Popchips.

Their snacks are made from the finest natural ingredients. The ad features hikers walking on a trail, while eating nature valley bars. They encourage you to go outside and enjoy nature and consume their snack.

The big names use things like high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and phosphoric acid to replace more costly ingredients like cane sugar, real extract, and natural juice. High fructose corn syrup is an incredibly low-buck additive that gives a sweet, refreshing taste. This has opened the floodgates to large companies which are now using it for just about anything these days. This in turn lowers the cost of the final product you see on the shelves. Your body can never deplete the MSG you consume. It will build and build forever. Phosphoric acid is known to soften bones and teeth. There is little warning through advertising about the long term effects of these man-made ingredients. We need to increase awareness of the proven dangerous ingredients companies are using in their products. Our government is allowing this to happen, thus diabetes, obesity, cancer, and heart problems continue to develop amongst not only adults, but the young generation as well. These quick and easy snacks are slowly killing

The company's products, to me, appear to fall in the areo of Product Maturity. Basically because the products that are made and sold are not new; however, because the items are already baked and packaged, they offer convenience to customers who do not have the time to mix ingredients and bake it themselves. Also, for thos who have no cooking skills, it offers and easy way to acquire the snacks.

ALL STAR Foods International (ALL STAR) is a large international manufacturer of snack foods, including potato chips, nacho chips, and pretzels, that are sold under the Tasty Crunch brand name. ALL STAR has operations throughout North America and Europe, and its international head office is located in Chicago. Consolidated net sales are in excess of US$1 billion, and ALL STAR’s shares are traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange.

are in excess of US$1 billion, and ALL STAR’s shares are traded publicly on the New

a potato chip company introduces a line of its potato chips with a new type of seasoning.

Frito-Lay first toyed with multigrain snack chips in the 1970s, when research indicated a need for a snack in this category. Prontos, released in 1974 and distributed for four years, weren’t incredibly well received. While a lack of success is attributed to a confusing name, poor manufacturing and too narrow a market, Dwight Riskey, VP of Marketing Research and New Business, admits that he is “not sure there were dramatic things wrong with the product design [...]. It may have been invented and introduced before its time.” This sentiment was reflected in the Harvest Project in the early 1980s, when Frito-Lay developed several multigrain products to attempt and have a possible healthy alternative to saltier snack foods for the baby-boomer generation. Lackluster response caused the project to stall into the mid 80s as focus was put on developing new flavors and healthier alternatives in other brands.

In order to market the product into the market successfully, marketers need to have some marketing strategy to enter the desired market and make profit. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a market into subsets of consumers with common needs or characteristics (Schiffman et al., 2011). Understanding the market size and segmentation is valuable, but the keys to effective targeting is to know just how valuable specific consumer groups are, and being able to quantify the impact of consumer trends ( Berry, 1999).

One can only assume that Chipotle uses concentration strategies for their corporate level strategies, because they only concentrate on the restaurant industry. Market penetration and market development is their main focus, as they are attracting new customers as they increase brand awareness through their business strategies and their “Food With Integrity” campaign, Farmed and Dangerous live action story-telling comedy series, and Cultivate Foundation, which is a non-profit organization supporting sustainable agriculture, family farming and food education, and they are expanding into new markets with international expansion, so Chipotle can continue “to change the way people think about and eat fast food” (Chipotle, 2015). Chipotle also, uses ‘product development’, but not as aggressively as market penetration. The most recent product development is a meat alternative made from tofu, called “Sofritas”. Chipotle is highly invested in Pizzeria Locale, suggesting the possibility of horizontal integration in the near future, and is using an adjacent strategy with its sister restaurant ShopHouse Southeast Asian

As every customer has unique needs and expectations towards certain products, the ultimate goal of market segmentation is to organize customers into groups which allows targeting of customers with similar needs of and response to the products. The key is to minimize differentiation within each segment

‘Market segmentation represents an effort to identify and catergorise groups of customers and countries according to common characteristics’ (Keegan and Green 2016, p.228). For any business, it is crucial that they segment their market accordingly or they will risk forgoing sales opportunities. Fahy and Jobber (2015) identify the objective of market segmentation as distinguishing groups of customers with similar requirements so