Pricing Strategies at Hp and Kodak

In summary, marketing is very important for a business to achieve success. Many businesses have a difficult time in this area. With the stiff competition, businesses struggle to stand out among others. Other companies resort in unethical and unfair schemes just to win the competition. But eventually find themselves in great loss and failure. As businesses all over the world enter into a gigantic marketplace, every business owner is faced with convoluted market competition. Nevertheless, any entrepreneur can be different and become successful in this matter. In every product sold and in every service provided, patience and hard work should take precedence to ensure quality. Products and services should be marketed honestly, planning should not be done with evil

The common public goal of the marketing discourse is to attract attention from targeted audiences, in other words make the consumer buy, buy, and buy. In order to achieve these goals I have to execute different marketing strategies with the help of the staff and company executives. Together we brainstorm different marketing trends, design different kinds of ads; analyze social media for more effective ways of advertising and calculate risks based on customer insight. When all is done right the end goal will result an increase of sales revenue for the company, which will sharpen its image and name.

I will never see the day when there is not yet room for improvement. Through time, HP's focus on innovation had brought the world products such as the handheld calculator and the inkjet printer. In 1992, the company continued to invest heavily in technology, spending $1.6 billion or 10% of revenue on research and development. The high levels of investment have paid off. For three straight years, over half of HP's orders had been for products introduced within the last two years.

All of these technological advances by HP receive the attention of Japan and China where HP expanded in hopes of continuing to invent newer and better technologies in the future. Since the 90’s HP has gone on to invent many other firsts like the first all-in-one device and is the first company to recycle ink cartridges. They have also acquired many smaller companies like Snapfish and Compaq to grow the company to being one of the industry leaders in personal computing. (Hewlett-Packard, 2013).

The organization further strengthens its daily sustainable products procurement policy while improving its offer ecological service by adopting solutions in waste disposal and optimizing energy consumption: in just one year, Staples recycled over 63 million ink cartridges (only in the US). Moreover, the company has worked hard to develop over 8000 products with positive environmental characteristics. Staples understands that a successful business is not just about its turnover and profits. It must therefore ensure that all of its employees, suppliers and partners comply with ethical and environmental

There are many strategies that organizations can incorporate in today’s business environment. An organization can decide to take on a low-cost provider strategy, a focused low-cost strategy, broad differentiation strategy, focused differentiation strategy, and/or a best-cost provider strategy. While all of them have their own unique features and can offer a competitive advantage over its rivals, Competitive Shoes, Inc. decided to incorporate the best-cost strategy into its organization in order to compete against it rivals. By incorporating the best-cost strategy into its organization, Competitive Shoes Inc. felt that they could stay

A company needs to create a series of programs to differentiate their product from those from its competitors and to appropriately price the product to achieve the maximum demand, in order to set up the dynamics of its competitive strategy (David, 2007). The competitive strategy of a company is also expected to offer better products or services to its customers, at a reasonable cost. Due to the mass influence of the external environmental on the customers’ preference, it is vital for the company to develop an available competitive strategy to be able to solve a series of problems, and ultimately to improve the company’s performance. Those problems include: how to differentiate its products or service from competitors, how to create market segments to maximize demands, and how to offer a wider range of products or services to better meet the customers’ needs at more acceptable costs (David, 2007).

“Marketing strategies can have a broad impact on the business in terms of instilling a marketing orientation among all those in the firm: the way of thinking or philosophy of the whole organization. However, marketing strategies can alternatively be seen as dealing only with the development of competitive advantages directly associated with the marketing function such as customer loyalty and distribution channel control. In the latter case, the domain is sometimes even further restricted by sole attention to the various element of the marketing mix rather than the more general issues of customer and channel relationships. There are two key

Mariotti & Glackin (2013) provide that development of marketing strategy and competitive advantage is from the "Four P's". The "Four P's" include product, price, promotion, and place. This paper further outlines each of the "Four P's". Mariotti& Glackin (2013) recommend continually referring to the mission statement and vision statement while developing the marketing strategy. This reference helps to build the marketing strategy and form the core competency for the business. The first part of the business plan, the mission and vision statements, are stated below:

Kodak currently has no position within the ink market. The ink business is a $45 billion a year sector that could regenerate Kodak’s position in the printing sector. The market for ink is dominated by HP, followed by Epson, Canon, and Lexmark. Entering a complete new market may be beneficial in its current position. According to Kodak, the greatest obstacle to printing at home is the cost of ink and supplies. Kodak can develop a cost efficient solution that will be more appealing to consumers. With the launch of this product, Kodak must focus on several sectors of business: marketing, pricing, distribution, and production. Onesource (2011).

A marketing strategy will help differentiate a business form other business in the same line of business. The best way to differentiate a business is to create a core message. By having a unique approach business can eliminate competition. Sof-A-Logue’s goals for the new year are to build their brand with a clear market value proposition and create plan’s product strategy. They also want to develop customer profiles by using customer segmentation systems and position the company as the number one personal communications company by a new hybrid marketing campaign. The marketing team will present The Power of Less which focuses on eliminating anything not contributing to the success of the company. The marketing team will focus on simpler,

What I feel about Kodak’s move was that they are trying to make a space for themselves in an already crowded market. Kodak is trying to carve out a niche for them by offering inks for low prices. But, they have forgotten the abilities of the competitors. They have probably underestimated them. HP and Canon are big names in the printing industry and because of their continued rollout of good quality products; customers trust them more than they trust Kodak. It is also observed that Kodak had forgotten that if HP lowers their price to almost the same level like Kodak, Kodak won’t stand a chance. The only way that Kodak can hope to make some profit is by hoping that their competitors won’t reduce the price of the inks as it is the only source of revenue in the printing industry. But I am pretty sure that marketing research people of Kodak has made a blunder by opting for this. The major fact is that they have forgotten cartridge refilling industry which is cheap too and people have started to use that as they are comparatively cheaper to the original printing inks. I sincerely feel that Kodak has taken the wrong path to get out of their troubles.

Competition heats up, sales decline, Sony and others move into digital, Kodak panics and thinks it can slow competitive pressures through aggressive marketing.

In contrast, HP has a very valuable printer business that Dell does not have in their PC maker. The reason that printers are so profitable is because demand of ink and other necessities. In the PC market HP could not afford to Dell's price margin as they need to spend on their marketing and physical supplies.

I. Introduction 1. There are several basic approaches to competing successfully and gaining a competitive advantage, but they all involve giving buyers what they perceive as superior value compared to the offerings of rival sellers. 2. This chapter describes the five basic competitive strategy option for building competitive advantage and delivering superior value to customers – which of the five to