Essay on Marketing and High End

Risk of increasing labor costs faster than expected which could directly impact the pricing of the products

Competitive advantage - Nundies is an innovative product which provides an alternative to visible panty lines; no other company produces the same type of product

Acquisition of the automated milling machine will increase the apparent costs of all jobs—not just those that use the new facility. This is because the company uses a plantwide overhead rate. If there were a different overhead rate for each department, this would not happen.

The Marketing process is made up of simple concepts that involve lots of research on the part of the marketer. The process begins with understanding the consumer, without knowing what consumers need or want, it would be extremely hard for firms to both develop and sell a product. Knowing that consumers want more green products due to growing environmental concerns is a very important detail. Needs and wants are what fuel consumer purchases and marketers must perform research in order to best serve their customers. Through this research, marketers are led to the next step of the process and can now develop a customer driven marketing strategy. Here, the firm must decide how it will differentiate its product from others on the market.

All segments are critical for the implementation of our company’s strategy because we chose to be broad cost leaders. Cost leaders maintain a presence in all market segments by focusing on low production costs and competitive pricing. With that in mind, one segment is considered to be slightly more important than the others: the low end segment. We will compete in every market segment, but this is one of the most important due to the fact that price is the main consideration of the buying criteria at 53% importance. Our costs will be much lower than our competitors which translates into a lower market price for this product, which is ideal for our customers.

Higher value can attract more customers or increase the profit margin for the value add benefit.

Discuss what is meant by the term “customer orientation”. Illustrate with examples how companies demonstrate their customer orientation by reference to at least two elements of the marketing mix.

Top managers develop long-range plans, called strategic plans that define the company's overall mission and goals. Strategic planning focuses more on issues that affect the company's future survival and growth. To develop strategic plan, top managers also need information from outside the company, such as economic forecasts, technology trends, competitive threats, governmental issues and shareholder concerns.

On the other hand, prices are the most insignificant buying criterion in High End, Performance and Size segments. No matter how high the prices are, customers in these segments are more preferable to high-tech product. In particular, for the High End and Size segments, ideal position occupies 43% and products’ ideal age is 29%. Furthermore, reliability is the most important consideration to customers in Performance segment. Hence, Niche Differentiation is a proper alternative for these three segments.

The above cost system was efficient during the 1980s because it split up overhead over three cost pools, adding an additional pool, which has machine hours as its cost driver. This proved efficient because “[w]ith increased usage of automated machines, direct labor run time no longer reflected the amount of processing being performed on parts, particularly when one operator was responsible for several machines.” Packet, pg. 7.

This document represents The i-Fusions Consultant’s Report on BRITA. The company’s current business situation is analysed and various options for action considered. The report aims to identify a clear marketing strategy for Brita in order to address the current issues facing the company the associated falling sales.

| | | | | | | | | | | | | |75000 | |100000 | |125000 | |150000 | |175000 | |200000 | | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |Direct Labor |4.00 |  |3.90 |  |3.80 |  |3.70 |  |3.80 |  |4.00 | |Material |2.00

7.Anticipate business problems that may result from allocating manufacturing overhead based on the cost of the prints.

Furthermore, the ACC strategy of offering increased variety requires shorter production runs which inherently increases the cost associated with each product and packaging, as idle time due to process changeover would increase between each product production (4.8% of time com-pared with 2% for DJC). The strategy of increased variety and production runs by the ACC would also affect labor in a number of ways. Direct labor costs would go up due to a larger amount of idle time associated with process changeover and the chance of increased problems associated with the

Today companies produce a wide range of products; direct labour represents only a small fraction of total costs, and overhead costs are