I. Situation Analysis
1. Background
The Faith Mountain Company has experienced a great deal of success since opening in 1977. What Cheri and Martin Woodard began as a local store that sold herbs, related products, and antiques has slowly evolved into a major mail-order catalog company and retail store that develops, manufactures, and markets high-quality gifts, apparel, and home accessories. In 1991, Faith Mountain was still a relatively small company with less than 50 employees. However, sales have been steadily increasing for Faith Mountain, as they went from about $1.2 million in sales in 1987 to just over $5 million in 1991. In 1991 The Faith Mountain Company set for itself the overall goal of $25 million in annual sales by 1995, with $10 million coming from sales from the Faith Mountain catalog, $5 million from the retail division, and $10 million from the acquisition and development of another catalog company. Reaching these goals will have implications in all areas of operation, including expansion, human resources, marketing, and finance.
2. Industry Overview
The Faith Mountain Company operates in the specialty mail-order industry. According to a study by Arnold Fishman of Marketing Logistics, the total mail-order sales in the United States in 1990 topped $200 billion, with consumer mail order at $98.2 billion. Of the consumer mail order, $40.7 billion was spent on services; $44.5 billion was spent on specialty merchandisers, and $13 billion on products from general merchandisers.
Total mail order sales for 1990 reflected 10.1 percent of general merchandise sales, 3.2 percent of retail sales, 2.1 percent of consumer services, and 1.8 percent of gross national product for the year. On a per capita basis, Americans spent an average of $393 on mail-order purchases in 1990.
Specialty mail-order vendors, such as The Faith Mountain Company, have a substantially greater share (77 percent) of consumer mail-order product sales than do general merchandising mail-order vendors such as J.C. Penney (23 percent).
As credit card companies offer new inducements and incentives to customers who shop by mail, it is anticipated that shopping by mail will become more prevalent. However, third-class postage rate increases and the placement of taxes on mail-order goods in some states may have a negative affect on the mail-order industry.
3. Business Unit Analysis
The Faith Mountain Company develops, manufactures, and markets high-quality gifts, apparel, and home accessories, distributing through use of two business units, the mail-order unit, which distributes catalogs four times per year and provided the bulk of the 1991 total sales with about $4.
This department at Sobeys looks at ways that they market themselves and the amount of sales.
Executive Summary- Mountain Man Beer Company (MMBC) is experiencing declining sales for the first time in the company’s history. Chris Prangel, who will inherit the family-owned business in five years is faced with a hard decision that whether to take the risk of launching a new product to attract younger customers or to follow his father’s steps, continuing doing the 80-year-old Mountain Man Lager business. His father has concerns about the profit, the core business and the cannibalization and Chris has done several researches to estimate the potential business opportunity of the new product Mountain Man Light Through an analysis about the company, the product and the market, it is clearly beneficial for MMBC to launch Mountain Man Light. But Mountain Man Lager is the core business without which it is impossible to develop a new product and grasp a new market share, which is the spirit of the decades-old brand. Therefore, while I recommend that launching Mountain Man Light to create a new business, appealing to younger and female customers and making profit, Chris should take these strategies into account: keeping enough effort on existed product and holding the top market position, developing the brand and expanding the product line, if he plans to make profit from the new product in two years.
Customers rely on these services daily so by keeping their customer service high both from the product side and face to face customer relations USPS can retain their loyal customers while hoping to gain additional consumers. A survey needs to be done in order for the USPS management to be able to evaluate their customers experience and overall performance measures relating to their product. Customers know what they want and what they need, and for USPS to be able to reach out and identify what that is will be a tremendous tool for operating decisions in moving
Montana Mountain Biking Company has been in business for 16 years providing guided mountain biking trips at four locations in Montana. The success of the company is linked to retaining its customers. Eighty percent of the customers who sign up for the one week guided mountain biking expedition are repeat customers (University Of Phoenix, 2007). An important part of any marketing plan is to understand the customer relationship because ultimately, all profits come from the customers. The challenges facing the Montana Mountain Biking company is not only retaining customers but to attract new customers. The advances in e-marketing have given Montana Mountain Biking some alternatives to traditional marketing plans.
Canyon Ranch has grown and expanded over the years, it expanded operations geographically as well as through different service lines, including medical services that were offered as health and healing services. As services grew, the size of the specialized workforce at Canyon Ranch also expanded to meet the unique and personalized needs of its customers (Applegate, 2008). This growth made the task and efficiency of providing specialized services that customers had come to expect much more difficult and required repeated opportunities to gather data from their customers. Canyon Ranch was also slow to grow their technology infrastructure, lacked the ability to leverage point of sale transactional systems at the many retail locations that they maintained across their resort and spa locations. This meant relying on inefficient means for gathering necessary customer information, while increasing the cost of providing personalized services. While Canyon Ranch remained profitable during this phase of growth in their company, the opportu...
The eighties prompted change as well as the opening of Best Buy’s first superstore. During 1983, a new corporate name was approved and the Sound of Music Company became known as Best Buy Co., Inc. With mounting consumer support Best Buy continued its road to expansion by opening an additional five stores. In 1985, the newly named company was being publicly traded under the symbol BBY. The late eighties brought forth additional change for the continuously growing company. Best Buy adopted a new concept in retail merchandising with the opening of massive superstores. The new concept shifted the placing of all inventory on the sales floor and hiring a specialized staff of non-commissioned service representatives (FAQ). Such adaptations have fueled the company into progression and continued to promote the company’s corporate vision of “Making life fun and easy”(Fact Sheet).
Every corporation has a marketing plan to know in what direction they are facing in the future. As we know since before, the four P’s of marketing is the key to success for a business. As it is right now, Burry Bookstore misses one of the 4 P’s, which is the promotion.
The United States Postal Service provides an efficient and reliable means of written communication across the United States for a low price. Recently; however, the USPS continues to lose both business and revenue as more competition enters the mail service market. Therefore, the USPS should be restructured to meet the needs of a changing world.
Kotler, P., & Keller, K. (2012). A framework for marketing management. (5 ed.). Upper Saddle
As a result of their huge number of sub-brands, assessing the market share of all their operations is difficult. In their key markets they hold the following shares;
When selecting our case, we wanted to choose a company that a majority of our class wouldn’t have heard of before. We were researching possible topics and companies and came across Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation. The company sold a wide variety of products ranging from vacuum-sealed jars of bacon to chewing gum from its inception in 1890. However, Beech-Nut’s most lucrative product was its baby food, which began around the 1930s. At this time, the company was the second largest producer of baby food products in the U.S. The company differentiated itself from competitors by packaging its product in glass jars rather than cans, which were used by most manufacturers. Their baby food line did well, but sales took off with the arrival of the postwar baby boom, where sales nearly doubled between 1948 and 1950. By 1950, Beech-Nut had 48 different types of jarred baby foods that provided more than a quarter of the company’s $70 million of revenue.
Modern religion has definitely run parallel to the world of marketing. In the 1980’s, the market place became much more competitive with new businesses offering products and services with increased value. Consumers were no longer confined to the same few establishments to dine and shop.
In today’s society the Internet has greatly reduced the number of sent letters through the US postal service. This is true because if you can send the same information to somebody without wasting paper it is much better on the environment. Another reason why so many people have switched to using e-mail is that it is just simply faster than waiting for a letter in the mail. One more reason people use e-mail more is that the rate of postage to send a letter is steadily going up. It is currently at 37 cents per letter where sending e-mail is free. Some of the negative effects of this shift of people using e-mail over actually mailing their letters is the postage per letter is increasing more often than ever because more people use the internet to send letters now because it is just faster than mailing a letter which could take up to a week to get to your house where e-mail is instantaneous.
Special thanks to John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, and Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collection Library.
Petty Ross D. Editor's Introduction: The What and Why of Marketing; American Business Journal, Vol. 36, 1999