Marketing Management Assignment help on : Marketing Strategy Plan

The Marketing Strategy Plan

The aim of the following report is to ascertain specific areas where a company as big as Colgate –Palmolive can address and implement a plan for a successful expansion and increased efficiency in its operations. The report lays down the key objectives and strategies of the company and presents the key performance indicators as well as the tools through which the objectives could be achieved. The report begins with a situational analysis of the current scenario for the company’s base and operations in the Australian continent. Further laying down the key performance indicators within the marketing strategy plan is used for deriving the possible ways to enhance the operations and increase the efficiency levels. The marketing strategies include product, price, place, and promotions by the company.

Situation Analysis

The Industry: The industry includes the products which are manufactured to prevent harmful chemicals, solutions, or day to day things from sticking on to the hands of people. The hand wash industry has several other players as well that give a stiff competition to the company. One of the major products manufactured by the company in this sector is the brand named Soft Soap. It has been well promoted and is among the popular hand wash liquids in the industry today(SVPG 2009).

The Company: Colgate-Palmolive is a company which was found in the year 1806 by William Colgate. The first few products which company started to manufacture included the soaps, perfumes and candles. Later in the year 1873 the company entered the oral healthcare by manufacturing the first toothpaste with aromatic dental cream which was sold in jars. Over a century it kept on expanding and exploiting the toothpaste and the soap industry. By the year 1991 the company had become the leader in household products which also included the oral health market. With a market share of over 19% in the oral care market the company had sales of over 1.03 billion dollars with a profit of 9.8 million dollars. The products portfolio was vast which had a few products in the hand wash segment for the company (Colgate 2011).

Today it is found across all the stores in the supermarket and pharmacy backed by excellent promotional strategies. The company is present in almost every country across the globe in which Australian markets is one of the biggest they operate. It caters to the entire product range of household products where the hand wash segment is predominantly new for the company. However it has backed it up by a range of products which are effective and provide a stiff competition to the other players in the market. Below the report evaluates the key objectives which the company should have in the coming years and a plan which can help the company reach a larger territory and cater to a larger audience.

The Product: The marketing plan prepared below is for the Hand Wash liquids that the company manufactures. Currently the company manufactures three different brands in this sector which are:

• Palmolive® Naturals
• Palmolive® Softwash Antibacterial
• Palmolive® Heavenly Hands™ Foaming Hand Wash
• Palmolive® Antibacterial Foaming Hand Wash

Objectives:The objectives of the following report are to lay out the plan for:

• Establishing the Key Performance indicators to be monitored for evaluating the marketing performance
• Preparing the communicating marketing objectives and performance indicators for relevant personnel in terms of the organizational requirements and policies
• Proposing the way through which the company can take feedback, mentor and coach the relevant staff, etc.
• Listing down the actions for capitalising over performance and minimising under performances against the marketing objectives and the key performance indicators.

Key Performance Indicators

Brand Performance KPI

To list down the key performance indicators for the company as a measure for the brand performance in relation to the objectives determined before and hence reflected in the marketing plan would be as follows.Thebelow three are in align with the existing practices by the company to use them as the key indicators and evaluating the performance levels of the company. These three indicators take care of the overall brand performance for which the sources could be as follows: (Colgate n.d.)

• People: This includes the Average number of employees, Total recordable rate (number of occupational injuries), Lost workday case rate (number of occupational injuries or illness causing employees being absent), Safety Notices of Violation (violation or citation issues by the government), safety fines paid (fines associated with NOVs), percentage of minority officials and managers, percentage of minorities in workforce, and percentage of women officials and managers. All the above indicators would be collected from the operating unit of the company within the Australian region.
• Performance: The performance indicators would require measuring the country wide sales of the hand was products by the company, cash contributions by the company to charitable organizations within the country, and charitable contributions in-kind.
• Planet: These performance indicators include the natural resources that are being used in the process of production. The total production and wastages needs to be calculated by the company in order to compare and improve the efficiency levels. The sources would be energy use efficiency, water use efficiency, CO2 emissions, wastewater COD’s, Environmental Incidents, Environmental Notices of violation, and environmental fines paid.

In order to evaluate the measures above an audit team needs to be appointed which records and compares the previous records available. A continuous evaluation would be very important for the company to improve its efficiency levels and address any concerns which may be internal or external that could have been affecting the company’s performance.

Product KPI

In order to measure the product popularity and the efficiency levels of the products manager there are several key indicators which needs to be recorded and evaluated. The measures of product performance for the hand wash products manufactured by the company should include tracking of the following key performance indicators:

• Average Revenue per seller: This needs to be calculated and compared by dividing the total revenue by the number of sellers. It will eventually help the company to encourage sellers for selling more goods.
• Average promotional revenue per listing: Calculating this would help in encouraging the sellers and keeping a track of the aggressiveness with which sellers are promoting their listings.
• Absolute number of high volume sellers: The management needs to segregate the high volume sellers and keep a track of the selling they make. This would also help the company to attract more high volume sellers.

The sources can be directly recorded from the amount of sell a company makes to the sellers. Using the data the company can record and hence evaluate the scope of exploiting the possible avenues for increasing its product sales through the product managers.

Pricing KPI

When it comes to pricing the indicators to measure if it has been priced correctly or not can include the following:

• Price of similar products by competitors: In the world of stiff competition the Colgate-Palmolive needs to provide quality products at the right prices. In order to evaluate if the company has priced its products correctly or not the management would require comparing its prices against the price of similar goods by other competitors.
• Sales of different products: The Company should record the products which are selling well in the market and the ones which are not doing well. By getting this data the company would be able to track down whether the products manufactured have been priced well and if the consumers are willing to shell out price tag.

Place and Distribution KPI

Supply chain management is one of the critical areas which the company needs to address to have an effective supply of its hand wash products. Meeting up the demands, reducing time lags, increasing the level of efficiency by following methods like Just in time production, etc. can be the possible solutions for improving the place and distribution policies of a company. The KPI for the above could be: (Supply chain Metric n.d)

• Inventory Turnover ratio: This ratio is calculated by dividing COGS by average inventory over a period of time. It will help in determining the time it takes to sell an inventory on hand for the company.
• Cycle Time Measurements: This basically includes measuring 4 basic time measurements namely:

1. Seller order promised time: It is the anticipated or the agreed time upon cycle time for a purchase order. This can be measured by the gap between the purchase order creation date and the requested delivery date.
2. Seller order actual cycle time: This can be measured by calculating the average time which takes for supplying the customer purchase order.
3. Manufacturing cycle time: This measures the firm planned order until the final production is reported. It takes into account the original planned production quantity against the actual production quantity.
4. Purchase order cycle time: This would measure the time taken for processing a purchase order to from the distribution hub to the seller.

Taking into record the entire data above the company can compare its performance for manufacturing and delivering the products to the sellers. This will help the company to understand if the time taken could be reduced for distributing its products and further reduce the storage costs by efficient supply chain management.

Promotion KPI

Promotion is regarded as one of the most essential elements of a marketing strategy for a company. A company needs to keep a track of the impact of its promotional strategies on the sales it makes. The two possible indicators to measure the impact would be: (Behind the Line n.d)

• Sales of a product pre and post a promotion: This can be measured by calculating the total sales made for a product per and post a promotion. The company needs to evaluate the effect of its promotional strategies by measuring the impact each of its applied strategies has on the sales.
• Effects of the channel of promotion used: Deciding upon the best channels through which the company could promote its products would be highly essential. This again needs to be derived from the effect of a promotional appearing on TV, print or any other source and its impact on the sales of the company.

Proposed organizational structure for Colgate-Palmolive

Colgate-Palmolive currently has a great well defined structure for its organization. However in order to increase the efficiency levels an organisational structure which is dedicated for the unit of Hand wash products by the company can follow the following organizational structure:(Franklin College n.d)

The above diagram is a perfect representation of an organized form of structure which could have well defined roles and hold accountability for a particular process within the organization. As shown in the figure the top management needs to appoint 3 different managers for the three departments namely Finance, Human Resources, Other. The finance manager would hold the importance of calculations and recording the different data which needs to be one of the drivers of the marketing strategic plan. He would also be responsible to allocate budgets and calculate different ratios to keep a track of the performance of the units. The Human resources manager should be responsible for the employee recruitment, compensation, leaves, and other factors related to management of the units within the organization. The other manager should be appointed to look after the Marketing as well as the relationships with the suppliers and sellers.

All the three managers mentioned above would be responsible to take care of the administrative wing and relationships with external as well as internal environment. The other three direct managers which the company needs to appoint would be the Product Managers and the Process Managers. Here the role of the products managers would be to plan, research, design, and get the products manufactured by placing instructions. Process Managers need to keep a track of the manufacturing process so that products are manufactured with the best efficiency levels. These three managers would need to make different teams to carry out specialized and dedicated tasks. In order to manage the teams the three managers would have to make team leads that would be responsible to take the instructions from the managers and implement them in the operational process. They would hence be a linkage between the managers and the on-field workers. All the tasks need to be clearly defined and roles assigned from the begging would help the organization to keep a track of the possible ways the company works towards collaborative goals while working in individual units. Also the product being the same could have two product managers to take care of the production process. But with different activities and process involved for the manufacturing process different process managers need to be assigned deepening on the number of process applicable.

Feedback, mentoring and coaching of staff

Colgate-Palmolive needs to implement an effective process and policy for communicating with its employees. The employees especially the on field workers have to be provided with adequate product knowledge and technical training for the activities they would be performing. This would be handled by the Human Resources Manager. The manager would be responsible for making every arrangement to provide the right training to its employees and workers for the task they are assigned. Also it needs to be mentioned that the process of mentoring and coaching the staff needs to be done on an on-going basis. This upgrades the technical knowledge of its employees and increases the prospects of them increasing the efficiency levels of operations. The Key Performance indicators for measuring the skill level and learning of an employee would be:

Skill Tests: This needs to be conducted at the end of every mentoring program that an employee undergoes. A dedicated tests whether verbal or written should be conducted to assess the effectiveness of the training programs that the employee has undergone.

Feedback: A continuous feedback from the employees of their experiences should also be one of the most vital elements. Employees in their feedback could provide relevant answers to the problems they are facing or the issues which they might have while working in the organization. Feedback at defined intervals would facilitate the organization to understand the key areas which needs to be addressed in order to improve employee satisfaction levels and further improve the efficiency of operations within the organization.

Contingency Plans against over or under performance

The market which the hand wash products by Colgate-Palmolive will target includes those consumers who are concerned of keeping their hands cleaned and staying healthy. It is known that dirty hands not only affect the persons hand physically but can be taken inside their body while eating food. Pricing usually is not a big factor in this sector but the quality of product and the effect it has is very important for the consumers to decide while purchasing them. Although a formal plan being in place could do well for the company it needs to be well prepared with contingency plans to counter over or under performance. Before clearly mentioning the possible plans for under performance or over performance the possible difficulties and risks need to be evaluated. They are:

• Problems for generating visibility
• Software or hardware issues may hamper order placement and fulfilment
• A mature market where a consumer exactly knows the need for buying the hand wash may not accept the product by the company.
• Problems of securing additional capital
• Over optimistic production or sales targets
• Delay in the supply or distribution networks
• Over production leading to high inventory
• Increased employee turnover

To take care of the possible weakness the company should make adequate plans to counter any possible situation from popping up. The contingency plans could for the above problems should be such that it could be implemented the moment it is required. Some of the possible steps which the company should take could be:

• Evaluate promotional strategies and make changes instantly if a strategy is not working in favour.
• The moment the company views the product not meeting the expectations of its customers it should evaluate the thing which is missing and add it to the product. This should be fast so that the product does not losses the market entirely.
• Have backup systems in place and power to keep the entire production and supply process working in a smooth manner. It calls for bigger investments but in the long run a backup system should always contribute to the company’s production at times of trouble.
• The sales and production targets need to be revised in case it is less or more than the actual capacity. On a regular basis the company needs to evaluate the current sales in the market and the production it is making. A well planned target of production which meets the actual sales demand is the optimum level a company should have. This would also contribute in maintaining a good inventory and cutting down the costs for the company.
• Employees are the essence of any organization. The company needs to compensate adequately to the employees for their efforts. At different intervals the company needs to provide incentives or appraisals so that employees give their best to the company. Also with regular incentives and appraisal in place the company can reduce the employee turnover.

The plans would be required at different levels and for different departments. For example the human resources manager would need to implement all the contingency plans for the KPI of the personal management. Similarly the operations manager would be responsible to implement the contingency plans related to production and meeting the proposed targets. It should be his responsibility to meet the targeted production levels and in case there is a shortfall or excess production he would need to take adequate measures for controlling the same.

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