Colgate Marketing Plan analysis

Colgate has realised the significance of marketing plan in its 200 years of existence. This is essential towards understanding the business plans, aims, and communicating the company’s horizon within the operational market.

This report will focus on the marketing plan for the new Colgate toothbrush called 360 Actiflex, as part of Oral care and Health products which comprises of Tooth paste, Tooth brush, Mouth wash and dental floss. Oral care is important because research indicate that a clean mouth prevents gum disease and prevent heart disease.

The plan will address the niche market of dental professional which will recommend the product to their clients and the product brand name will remain to be Colgate.

Situation Analysis

Colgate Palmolive has been in existence for over 200 hundred years and they operate in more than 70 countries such as Brazil, America, Latin America, Asian etc which will enable to penetrate the new market easily. This is as a result of their brand, experience, capacity in term of resources and existing structure.

Product Classification

The 360 Actiflex brush with flexible head for cheek and tongue cleaner is design to clean all direction, to remove bacteria from your teeth, cheek, gum and tongue for healthier mouth. Customers want toothbrush that can give them healthy clean teeth and breathe at a reasonable price.

Market Summary

Colgate Palmolive is aiming to increase its market share in toothbrush which is currently at 30% in 2009 by demonstrating proficiency and professionalism by serving new and existing customers. Through the R&D, Colgate has been able to improve their existing products and introduce more products which meet the customers need in dental care.

Market Needs

According to research, customers only need two or three toothbrushes a year. 65% of customers have more than one toothbrush, 24% keep brush at work & 54% have special toothbrush for travelling.

Buying Behaviour Pattern

Customers base their purchase of tooth brush on how comfortable it feels in their mouth, whether it is soft enough and suits their mouth size or flexible enough. Their purchase is also base on the ability of the toothbrush to remove food particles, plaque removal and gum stimulation.

SWOT ANALYSIS

Strengths

‘ Colgate maintains strong relationship with dental professional, wholesalers and retailers.

‘ Have a good communication with the consumers through media and other social resources

‘ Extensive industry knowledge and expertise

‘ Well designed training programme.

‘ Ability to convince customers to spend more though continual rebranding and growing company sales by releasing new twists on under established brands.

Weaknesses

‘ Increase competition where other competitors produce the same products.

‘ The recent recession has impact on the reduction of planned expansion.

Opportunities

‘ Oral care is a growing industry with the ever changing customers taste.

‘ Continuous innovation using the idea technology challenge.

Threats

‘ Changes in exchange rates for foreign currencies, which may reduce the U.S. dollar value of revenue, receive from oversea market sales.

‘ Political or economic instability or changing macroeconomic conditions in our major markets,

‘ Lack of well-established or reliable legal systems in certain areas where the Company operates,

Objective Setting

‘ Colgate by introducing the 360 Actiflex toothbrush is aiming to achieve the following objectives:

‘ To retain the 20% existing loyal customers

‘ To increase current awareness level of brand from 5% to 15% in 12 months through integrated campaign of advertising, sales promotion and sponsorship.

‘ To acquire more customers by targeting the luxury segments of the market.

Strategy Development

The objective of Colgate Palmolive is to position the company as continuous market leader of oral care and Heath care, serving domestic market as well as international market.

To enter the market Colgate will start with our dental professionals whom we have collaboration with in our existing various areas of operation. The company will make small adaptation upon on this product which will permit to save cost.

There will be a launch of the product in selected dental professionals where the demonstration of how the product is use will be provided.

Tactics

As part of tactic the large advertising campaigns will be launched through promotion activities which will include advertising by posters, television, outdoor adverts, online adverts.

B: CRITICALLY EVALUATE THE MARKETING PLAN, IN PARTICULAR ITS MARKETING ENVIRONMENT.

Marketing environment entails the players and powers outside the marketing that affect management steadiness to build and sustain effective relationships with target customers.

Prosperous Companies mostly identify the vital importance of continuously observing and adapting to the ever-changing environment.

The marketing environment of a company can be categorised into two areas this include macro environment and micro environment, the macro environment include the main actors of the company involved in producing, distributing, and promoting the offering.

The marketing environment analysis can provide insight of online and offline competitive environments. Using Five Forces Model, Porter explains that in any industry there are five forces that influence what happens within the industry, these five forces combine to make up the business environment.

By studying the structure of dynamics between these forces, the company can discover opportunities for improving the marketing strategies. When developing company marketing plan which include the marketing, this can not be completely ruled out strategies Colgate Palmolive can identify the ‘forces’ as:

The Threat of new entrants

There has been n o major new entrant to the industry for the past few years leaving the giant manufacturer of consumer goods like Colgate and others to dominate the scene. However, no major changes appear to be existing barriers to entry such as the economies of scale already benefited by the Colgate as a player who have been in the business for long. As a result of difficult trading conditions in the environment, capital requirements and integration costs are high due to the downturn in the increase interest rates rises.

Power of supplier

Tighter credit markets may lead to business disruptions for certain of the suppliers, contract manufacturers or trade customers which could, in turn, adversely impact colgate business. Even though this look impossible as the supplier will not want to loss Colgate business because of its global presence worldwide, this cannot be totally ruled out.

Competitive Rivalry

Significant competition in the industry could affect the business, for instance the rigorous competition around the world, especially from the bigger multinational consumer product companies who have greater resources than Colgate. The ability to compete depends on the strength of our brands

and on our ability to protect our patent, trademark and trade dress rights and to defend against related challenges brought by competitors. A failure to compete effectively could adversely affect the growth and profitability of the company

Limitation of the Five forces method

The limitation of this method is the interaction of the forces with each other especially in relation to the cosmetic life cycle which affect the competitive forces significantly.

Media/IT Interference at Colgate Palm Olive

In 200 years of existence, information technology and media has assisted to develop a vibrant organization at Colgate. As the trend in IT changes over the years, it has also been reflected in every operations the organization. Starting with the ancient IBM system units of early 1950s to the first consumer computers of 1977 (Apple I, II & III), Colgate has grown alongside to compliment the transition with time.

In the modern era, parts of the positive impacts can be seen in bulletin board services, computer conferencing, computer output on microfilm, communication network, decision support systems, Electronic mail (e-mail), Electronic spread sheet, Telex, video chat, teleconferencing and the likes has been a major contribution of IT and media to the industry. Not to mention the advanced electronic instrumentation for packaging and transportation that we could notice at every stage of production. Marketing to a layman can now be found on twitter, facebook, youtube, text messaging, google, eposters and the likes. On a negative side, insecurity of data and records has been a major setback of modern IT and media in marketing. The major fear here lies in the future of the system whether or not it still pose similar advantages or negative significance. All the aforementioned means of marketing in the modern era has lots of impacts both positively and negatively:

Positive Impacts of Media/IT

Marketing speed and Convenience

Modern IT/media has posed lots of advantages on how fast information can be disseminated. A SATA system has a data transfer rate of 300Mb/s (Wisegeek 2011). It indicates that a huge data of the size of a disc could be communicated to a large set of audience in less than one second. Marketing is now possible 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Customers can now bridge the queuing problems at stores (Hollensen 2007).

Cheaper dissemination routes

Because of easy means of data flow, the cost of distribution has fallen considerably over time. It cots as low as 50 pence to fax a page whereas millions of pages will sent across the internet/media at almost a free distribution cost. Apart from the fact that the whole world receives the information at once and at the same quality, the impacts are the same with the impression expressed. Moreover, it is possible to search for the lowest price available for brands (Hollensen 2007). Online financial services are also possible through these means.

Effective communication

Media and IT has made it possible to decide on target audience, detailed information like product, availability, and pricing are provided for the people. Through the use of multimedia, the customers could have a better understanding of their needs by for example depicting the interior decorations or by showing the beauty of housing estates.

Means of reducing workloads

Marketing requires lots of workloads which have been reduced by adopting information technology. IT supports the full range of organizational functions and processes that delivers products and services to customers and other key stakeholders (Chaffey et al. 2000). Different functional parts of the organization can be corporately glued with the aid of this tool.

Negative Impacts of Media/IT

Despite the raging benefits enjoyed by the organizations using IT/Media, the following fears are yet to be addressed:

Authentication

Identity problem is still yet a major problem of modern marketing. The use of passwords as a safe key has been compounded by the hacking programmers. Loop holes have been created in lots of marketing links. This has posed a challenge to the future of e-marketing/media communication systems.

Spam Disease

Spam diseases in marketing involves filtering off of positive information from the direct sender by hackers or computer viruses

Data Saturation

Crashing marketing

There is tendency for marketing crash of similar products from different manufacturers. Sometimes we found it difficult identifying the differences in the advertisement from similar companies.

Insecurity channels

Crackers often capture details rendering the marketing system unsafe for customers. Many fears have been expressed by customers on crackers capturing the credit/debit card details. This is still a threat to be investigated in future of information technology and media.

References

S Hollensen (2007) Global Marketing A decision-oriented approach, fourth edition pp. 499-506.

Wisegeek (2011) A website on data transfer rate, [online], Available at www.wisegeek.com/what-is-data-transfer-rate.htm Assessed: 29 Mar. 11