Advanved Research Solutions For Strategic Decision-Making

THE MARKETING ANALYSTS is concerned with helping clients identify, select and implement successful marketing strategies.   Our intent is to provide our clients with advanced research solutions to improve the quality of strategic decision-making.

Clearly, the right strategic decision-making produces the positive outcomes that every organization seeks.  However, wrong decisions may produce disastrous results.  As example, here are some startling statistics from well-known American retailers:

•             1990 – 2004         Circuit City grew from $2 billion to $9.75 billion.  Five years later, the company filed for bankruptcy.

•             1930’s   Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were about equal in sales and profits.  Twenty years later, Sears was about three times larger than Montgomery Ward.  In 2001, Montgomery Ward closed all of its remaining stores.

•             1991       Walmart surpassed Sears and Kmart to become the largest US retailer.  Today Walmart is the largest retail company in the world and is becoming one of the largest grocers in the US.

While these examples are dramatic, every organization is affected by strategic decisions. Thus every company must plan and act strategically.  You can uncover the information you need through numerous ways—from online research to focus groups to predictive models.  With effective market research, we can help you determine the need for your service or a product’s likelihood to sell, target-market demographics, and determine desirable store locations. To help you meet your target market’s needs, we offer a leading collection of tools, resources and professionals.

THE MARKETING ANALYSTS can help you.

Conjoint Analysis • Marketing Mix Models • Brand Maps • Market Segmentation • Product Line Management • Sales Forecasts • Advertisement Optimization • Data Mining • Market Basket Analysis • Customer Retention/Predictive Customer Churn

Dallas, Texas • Fort Myers, Florida • Sofia, Bulgaria • Cologne, Germany • Moscow, Russia

US TOLL FREE: 866-371-4863
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FAX: 480-393-5183
Email: info@themarketinganalysts.com

Marketing Research For Product Line Management

Most organizations market more than one product.  For example, Unilever, a giant consumer products manufacturer, may offer one of its shampoos in a variety of scents.  From a marketing perspective, a company’s product line is the group of products that are closely related.  For instance, products may be similar in a broad sense because of product class.  Proctor & Gamble has a food products line, a paper products line and a cleaning products line.  Products within a line may perform a particular function such as laundry care.  A product line could also be identified by price points and by distribution channel strategies.  For example, the Kenmore brand of appliances is only available through Sears.

Strategic Product Line Management

When developing a new product line or evaluating an existing product line, there are several factors to consider.  For example, what variables should be used to distinguish one product from another?  Many companies find it useful to distinguish between lines using a good-better-best approach.  For example, Lennox Industries, a manufacturer of heating and cooling equipment (HVAC) has a builder grade line (entry level $), a standard line (good $$) and their Signature line (best $$$).  As another example, Dr. Pepper offers a diet line of soft drinks and a regular line of soft drinks.

Because a company may offer several classifications of products and define its various product lines in many ways, there is a real need for a term that encompasses all offerings from an organization.  That term is the product mix. For instance, Samsung manufactures and sells televisions, mobile phones, monitors, Blu-ray players, cameras, heavy equipment, ships and more.   The term width of product mix is used to identify the extent of product lines associated with a company’s firm regardless of how diverse or narrow it might be.

Product Line Decisions & SKU Reduction

In many companies, marketing departments have launched too many new products that offer little differentiation and provide no incremental profit.   In addition to development and marketing costs, the cost to warehouse, distribute and continue to promote these items can be equally expensive and inefficient.    You can easily understand the challenges facing product managers when you factor in additional challenges that include retail space limitations, slotting fees, stock-outs and gaining visibility.  As a result, there is a tremendous need for better decision-making relating to new product development, sku rationalization and sku reduction.

Strategic Product Line Planning

To solve the problem, THE MARKETING ANALYSTS offers proactive marketing research techniques to determine if the amount of differentiation of a new SKU offers incremental value.  This type of research provides extremely valuable results when planning a SKU based on new flavors, colors, scents, sizes, etc.).  Our marketing research techniques provide answers to questions like “What is the best set of product combinations (SKU’s) that will maximize profitability?”, “What is the most efficient combination of SKUs to offer that maximizes the differences between SKU’s and avoids perceived similarity?” and “What should the priority be when offering new SKU’s?”  Most importantly, our approach provides manufacturers with the answers they need before investing in product development and marketing launch strategies.

Strategic Product Line Planning Predictive Product Line Strategy Research

The Risks of Product Line Planning
As a manufacturer, there are many important decisions that must be made when introducing new product lines and making product lines changes. In addition to product development and marketing costs, most retail chains require slotting allowances regardless of whether your product is a hit or a flop. In many cases, these slotting allowances can run from $10,000 to $40,000 or more per item.

While some industry experts advise manufacturers to build the slotting fees into the cost, the competitive environment won’t permit it. Further, while some retailers may provide trial terms, under these programs the manufacturer must still agree to invest in expensive merchandising packages that may include in-store radio, newspaper advertising.

What is Strategic Product Line Planning?
Strategic product line planning involves a proactive marketing research technique that determines the optimal set of product combinations (ex: such as colors, flavors, scents, sizes, etc.) that minimize marketing risks (retail space limitations, stock-outs, poor visibility, etc.) and maximize the difference among items to avoid perceived similarity. This approach provides manufacturers with answers before they invest in product development and marketing launch plans.

A Real World Example
Smokey Forest Bratwurst is considering the introduction of a new line of low-fat Bratwurst. Currently, their R&D kitchen and Marketing department is considering the recipes from 18 SKU’s to include in the new line. However, the Marketing department has a limited budget and needs to narrow the initial offering to the 3 to 5 SKU’s that offer the greatest uniqueness, highest potential for profitability and strongest consumer appeal over the entire product line.

The Strategic Product Line Planning Solution
Our research method uses a sophisticated analytical procedure that evaluates the economic utility of each item in conjunction with all possible combinations of SKU’s being considered. By using mathematical game theory, we derive scores for each SKU being considered with respect to all possible SKU’s. Once the scores are ranked, the set of SKU’s offering the highest scores represents the priority for inclusion into your optimal product line.

In addition to providing the brand manager with strategic decisions at the R&D stage, our Strategic Product Line Research provides a roadmap for success for the future addition of SKUs.

ABOUT: THE MARKETING ANALYSTS

THE MARKETING ANALYSTS was founded in Dallas, Texas and has satellite offices in Naples, Florida; Bulgaria; Germany; Egypt and Russia to provide a one-stop solution for high quality, low cost solutions for your special marketing needs. Initially launched as a marketing research company, we now provide a variety of integrated marketing solutions including web site design, search optimization, proofing and language translation services. Our team is highly talented and consists of Marketing Ph. D’s, Marketing Managers, Mathematicians, Computer Science Engineers and Language Translators who hold advanced degrees from respected universities known around the world.

With direct access to highly skilled talent pools in eastern european, we are able to leverage all activities to effectively meet each of our client’s unique objectives.

Our strategic mix of marketing-based services include:

Quantitative Services:

· Analytical Marketing Research

· Predictive Marketing Models

· Advanced segmentation

· Predicitive Data Mining and AI

International Translation & Localization Services:

· Medical Records

· Websites with Search Optimized Content

· Marketing/PR Collateral

· Academic Files

· Industry specific documents

· Proofing

Web Design & Development:

· Search Optimization

· Dynamic Websites

· Predictive Ad Response

Our unmatched professionalism and commitment to achieving results guarantees the highest level of client service, every time. We look forward to the opportunity to serve you.