Now that we're starting the marketing simulation portion of the course, it's set up an interesting situation for us students to approach. Vicks cold medicine (AKA Allround) is without question the market leader, ranking first for crucial stats such as market share and brand awareness. The problem is, however, that the lead the brand has accumulated is starting to slowly slip away when it comes to sales. In an ever changing world full of competition and innovation, even the strongest market leader will eventually capitulate and crumble into oblivion if a culture of complacency starts to sink in. As an example of this, you could just ask the former executives of Blackberry back when it was in its prime. They ruled the market not too long ago, but failed to foresee the direction the industry was headed and became completely irrelevant within a few years.
It's up to us, as students, to curb the trend that is beginning to occur for Vicks. It's a known brand with high consumer satisfaction ratings and a pretty reasonable price, but consumers are slowly starting to move on. It will be very interesting to attempt to diagnose what the reasons are for this decline, and what the most effective and impactful marketing solutions are to initiate a trend back in the right direction.
Chris, I like your comparison to Blackberry. I believe also that companies have to move with the trends. When I was doing my Budweiser Analysis assignment, I found some research on executives opinions and thoughts about trends and how they deal with them. As a flourishing company one of the most difficult things to do is attack a trend before it even starts, this is a high risk in any business. But what comes with high risk is high reward if you implement it correctly. I think the biggest thing marketers need to utilize is the free research given to them through engagement and social media.
ReplyDeleteChris, I also liked how you related our simulation to Blackberry. However, with Allround being the highest in product effectiveness in the industry I simply think that statistic alone will help to keep them a leader for a while. But I do agree with you in the fact that they must change somethings to remain high up in the cold industry.
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