Final Marketing Project

Hypothesis:

Expansion is inevitable for WVC at its headquarters, Oquendo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Our facility which holds 66,000 sq. of lab / meeting space, is ready to expand starting next year, 2016. One of the services we provide, among many others, is brewed coffee/hot tea in small coffee pots. We are not going to be able to keep up with the demand of coffee with the expansion bringing in more clients.  Opening a Coffee shop like Starbucks would be a solution and a profitable idea for the company.

Analysis

At its core, the Oquendo Center is a facility designed for professionals to share, communicate, teach and learn. It is a truly incomparable venue which houses over 66,000 square feet of state-of-the-art space devoted to practical, clinical and knowledge-based learning for any medical profession. It can also serve as an open canvas for any meeting or event. The Oquendo Center has earned the distinction as one of the only facilities of its kind in the country.

At Oquendo Center we cater to two different costumers, those who work for the veterinary field and those who work for the human medicine field. The veterinary clients will try to save money in any way while the human medicine clients will spend whatever it takes to make their events better than their competition. The only thing both fields have in common is coffee, they love their coffee!

Starbucks restricts its dealings to corporations, companies or groups of people. It engages primarily in joint venture and licensing agreements with stores where it did not originally have the ability to create its own store outlet.

The results of the survey conducted at oquendo Center were not surprising, eighty-nine percent of customers/attendees are coffee drinkers. The majority prefer Starbucks brand over any other major chain. Opening a Starbucks cafe at Oquendo Center will be a profitable added value to the company.

" Starbucks record financial and operating performance in Q2 was driven by our people all around the world yet woven together by one common thread-industry leading partner(employee) facing and customer facing innovation" said Howard Schultz, Starbucks chairman and CEO. "Innovation is the force that will continue to drive our business and enable to expand and increase revenues and profits.

For 87 years, the Oquendo Center and Western Veterinary Conference has been among the most highly anticipated events in the veterinary community. More than a conference, it has become and industry institution, a place where the best and brightest congregate , where the latest breakthroughs are announced, the most innovative techniques are shared. All these give us a reason to partner with and bring together two successful companies.

The Dark Side of Marketing Research

Marketing has always had a dark side or questionable ethics when it comes to get the attention of the public for their own profit. I am going to give you one of the many great cases where marketing played a big role in saving a mayor industry: The tobacco industry.
The next article talks about the tobacco industry during the 60's thru the 80's and their efforts to stay in "power".
During the introduction of low yield cigarettes, manufacturers were concerned that consumers may become weaned from smoking. These manufactures employed tactics to lead consumers to perceive filtered and low yield brands were safer relative to other brands. This tactics included using cosmetics filters, using medical menthol, generating misleading data on tar and nicotine, etc. "Advertisements of filtered and low tar cigarettes were intended to assure smokers concerned about the health risks of smoking and to present respective products as an alternative to quitting. Corporate documents demonstrate that cigarettes brands described as "light or "ultra-light" because of low machine measured yields"(tobaccocontrol.bmj.com).
 The advertising spending for new low yield products from 1976 to 1978 was awesome and commanded a very disproportionate share of the firms' total advertising budgets—share-of-voice (SOV). Contemporary advertising trade accounts described this promotional flurry as “a numbers game that boggles the mind while promising to relieve the lungs” New brands and product line extensions (variations of familiar brands) were introduced with major budgets as shown in the box below.

“The phenomenal growth of hi-fi brands is, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hi-fi expenditures have grown from 7% SOV in 1972 to 45% in 1977, much faster than actual segment growth”.⁶²“[T]he low tar revolution [of 1976ff] is not ignited by a particular event, such as a Reader's Digest article, a Surgeon General's Report, etc.; it happens quietly based on technologically improved products and consumers' desire for a reasonable compromise and the industry's massive advertising support leading category development”(The dark side of marketing seemingly Light cigarettes: successful images and failed fact, R.W Pollay, T. Dewhirst)..

GRAPHING SURVEY QUESTIONS

The Esquire Survey of Drinking

Graphing your survey questions is easier if you own a Mac. You just put your results in Excel sheet and click on graph and voila it will automatic graph it for your with any graph style you want. Save the chart as picture (jpg) and then you can insert the file into your blog or any other doc. 

Final Project Pitch

My final marketing project will be for the company I work for, Western Veterinary Conference, one of the biggest conference in the nation for veterinary medicine and human medicine as well. Our company is growing very fast, we are planning for an expansion of our building to accommodate our growing clientele. So I came up with a suggestion to my CEO, David Little a few months ago, of having a Starbucks cafe inside our building. We brew instant coffee for our customers sometimes we cannot keep up with the brewing!.  My hypothesis is that if we open at Starbucks, doctors would not mind if they have to purchase a cup of coffee, it will be convenient for them since they do not have to get out of the building to purchase their favorite drink while having a break during their long lectures.With the new expansion of our building it means that we will have more clients and our coffee pots won't be enough to handle demand for coffee.

NEW PRODUCT: ANALYSIS

The new fragrance product is for women, so my survey question was towards female but some males did answered as well since some of them are the buyers for that product. Now my hypothesis was that women, specially my target demographic, do not care much for celebrity brand names which is not the same as a celebrity endorsing a perfume like Chanel No 5.
 The fourth-quarter sales announced by Elizabeth Arden earlier this month weren’t just alarming to analysts. They point to something that some people in the fragrance business have long suspected: Celebrity name-slapping on perfumes and colognes has its limits.(adweek.com) Because of my survey and together with my research, the conclusion is that the millennial generation do not care about celebrity brand names, they care about quality and they are not afraid to pay for quality and value. According to retailleader.com "To engage millennials, or those between the ages of 17 and 34 who collectively are expected to spend more than $200 billion annually starting in 2017 and $10 trillion in their lifetimes, companies should engage them with social media, Advertising Age said. When millennials provide feedback, companies should acknowledge it, the story said. This demographic forms intense brand loyalty, with 70 percent claiming they come back to brands they prefer."

NEW PRODUCT

HYPOTHESIS: Women prefer well known perfume brand names over celebrities brand.
PERFUME INDUSTRY: No longer considered as an extravagant grooming accessory, perfumes have metamorphosed into a “feel good” factor, which complements the consumer’s need for expressing individuality, and personal style. The wide range of themes and choices enable consumers to choose fragrances that complement respective personal and characteristic traits. It is clear that the fragrance industry is booming. Sales may be soft in the U.S., but they booming overseas. According to Euromonitor, The perfume industry will bring estimated $46 BILLION a year in revenue by 2017 or 2018,
 PITCH:
L'FEMME perfume for women would do just that, it will expressed  women individuality and their personal style by harmonizing the most popular scents in nature with  lily of the valley being one of the main aromas. Being feminine and sexy is not longer just wearing stilettos and wearing makeup but smelling good no matter what you wear. 

The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Today's market is so competitive compared to 15-20 years ago. Companies are so eager to gain customer base at all cost. They all want to be the first ones to deliver what the customer wants and what they need as fast as possible. Unfortunately our privacy would have to suffer in order for us to have our needs and wants delivered no matter how, and the only tool available is the Internet. Marketer researcher are using what they call, mapping and tracking.
"The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

• The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to "cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months."(WSJ)

One such ecosystem is Yahoo Inc.'s ad network, which collects fees by placing targeted advertisements on websites. Yahoo's network knows many things about recent high-school graduate Cate Reid. One is that she is a 13- to 18-year-old female interested in weight loss. Ms. Reid was able to determine this when a reporter showed her a little-known feature on Yahoo's website, the Ad Interest Manager, that displays some of the information Yahoo had collected about her.(WSJ)
We are so busy with our lives that we do not realized that our lives are being monitored and that is scary.