Topic 18 – An Organisation's Marketing Strategy & its Effectiveness

18) A review of the marketing strategy of an organisation and its effectiveness.

Please help me in identifying what kind of organisation should I choose?

i am doing topic 18

a review of the marketing strategy of an organisation and its effectiveness

do i need to include questioners and do some graphs?

i completed the project but did not include these

all my research was based on articles from business magazines, books internet personal
experience

please tell me will they fail me i didn’t do questioners and graphs?

@Abi said:
am i looking in the wrong places??help anyone please 🙁

Well that depends where you are looking! If you are expecting to find a nice few articles called “The marketing strategies of Asda” – you will (a) be looking forever and (b) expecting too much. Start by reading some good articles on marketing. Here’s this one ‘A brief summary of marketing and how it works’ from the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing:

https://www.cim.co.uk/files/7ps.pdf

Then you will need to think about how Asda positions itself in the market and how it competes with its rivals on the 7 P front and whether it targets particular segments of the population. You have to research most of this – the sorts of promotions and advertising and other marketing methods used by the company for yourself. Look at their ads in newspapers and on Tv, visit a couple of their stores and see for yourself how they try to appeal to customers. Look for business articles online e.g. BBC business pages, Daily Telegraph

To measure effectiveness you need to get info from the financial statements and annual report for a few years on marketing costs and calculate marketing costs to sales and profit. (Read the CEO and Directors reports too as they give some good insight into the company strategies generally). You should also get some market share figures for the last few years so that you can see if their share is growing or diminishing.

There is plenty of info out there but you have to make the effort to find it and piece it together to produce a coherent RAP.

@Abi – Asda is part of Walmart and the parent company has filed its 2014 accounts in the USA, although they do not contain information relating in detail to individual subsidiaries. However the 2014 statements did mention in the specific context of Asda the success of ‘click and collect’, ‘Price guarantee’ and how Asda’s online grocery business is growing rapidly – so all things you can explore

It is not the end of the world if you don’t have the 2014 Asda accounts (they do not have to file these with Companies House UK until the Autumn and 2013’s statements were not filed until October 2014), so you can mention the lack of being able to acquire marketing costs in your limitations. You can try to find info about market share as business articles may give this. You need to be able somehow to assess the effectiveness of the company’s marketing strategies – increased revenue all round and sales per employee may be superficial indicators of this. One thing that you may be able to research that will give currency to your work is to evaluate the success of Asda’a Christmas 2014 marketing campaign. I am fairly certain someone will have reviewed all the big supermarkets’ Christmas campaigns as they are the most important of the whole year.

Don’t fret about having the very latest accounts- what I meant by students being failed was where the whole RAP did not show much evidence of being based on recent material – as long as there is ample information relating to 2013 and 2014 that will be current and suffice for P30.

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@Abi – regarding referencing take a look at Appendix 3 of the OBU Information Pack and read some my posts on the Forum ‘Harvard Referencing’ where I give some specific answers to particular problem areas. Many universities have their own webpages on referencing so ‘Harvard Referencing’ put into a search engine will bring them up (Note: OBU does not mandate Harvard but it is highly recommended as if you reference properly and thoroughly according to this system you should meet the requirements)

One little thing that occurs to me about your work: You must focus on the remit of T18 i.e. the Marketing Strategies (of Asda) and their effectiveness. It is NOT a comparison of Asda and Tesco’s strategies. While it is appropriate to make some comparisons where relevant (with any of the other big 3 or Waitrose), this is NOT T8 where you have to have a comparator. If your focus shifts to doing a comparison rather than assessing the actual effectiveness of Asda’s strategies, you may not achieve the OBU objectives that are expected for T18. What you should be doing through the use of the 7 Ps is looking at all the ways that Asda promotes itself and its products (in general) and evaluate how successful these are in increasing sales and market share. As part of your critical review you may bring in examples from other supermarkets if appropriate and such a comparison adds value to your comments but do not keep making comparisons just as a matter of routine otherwise you risk diluting the emphasis of T18.

You could try to see if you can built up the profile of the ‘typical Asda shopper’ and see how the strategies and 7Ps meet the needs of these people. (You could consider some primary research but read up on how to do this properly first – see p.36 Info Pack for Phil Clarke’s article).

@Abi – no problem with using the internet but reference well (no URLs in the report itself but put the full link in the ref list)

I think if I were doing T18 on Asda I would focus on the 7 Ps – particularly looking at how Asda attracts customers through the door in the first place e.g. the promotion and price sides and then how they try to enhance the ‘store and in-store experience’: ease of location, parking, smooth and fast checkout and store facilities (e.g. pharmacy, cafe/restaurant and other ancillary services such as dry cleaning drop off, shoe repairs).

You may find this link useful https://www.marketingweek.com/brands/asda/
(however I am not sure how much info you can access without a paid subscription but register and see)

The one area I would also focus on (as mentioned previously) is the Christmas campaign, (where it would be appropriate to do the comparisons with the other big 3 + Waitrose). The Christmas campaign is possibly the one big opportunity for the big 4 to try to steal customers from each other, to get people who have never shopped with a particular store to give it a chance.

Just by chance I came across an old copy of the DailyTelegraph today from the week before Christmas which had a double page spread for Asda. I was surprised to see how Asda had teamed up with the Leith School of Food and Wine (one of London’s renowned cookery schools). Maybe I am being a snob here but I wouldn’t have expected Daily Telegraph readers to be natural Asda shoppers (more likely to shop in Waitrose or Sainsbury’s I would have thought) but when I looked at the ad it was for high end luxury food so perhaps the idea behind this was to tell such people that Asda can do posh as well. It may have been a clever attempt to get potential shoppers who would just never think of going to Asda to try it. Much shopping behaviour is habitual, so the hope might have been to attract customers away from Sainsbury’s and possibly Waitrose, show them what Asda can offer in terms of a full store experience and possibly they might become regular Asda shoppers.

This is the kind of evaluation and critical thought you are expected to apply – not just state that the company does something but consider what is the strategy and the real aim behind it?

@Abi – it wasn’t an article it was a double page advertisement all in colour with the caption “Just what you want for Christmas. Smiles all round.”

Extra Special in partnership with Leiths School of Food and Wine

It featured Corn-fed Turkey, pre-pared roast potatoes, Dressed Orkney Crab, Mulled Wine Cheesecake, Melt in the middle Chocolate Pudding, cheeses and quality wines (all at reasonable prices and nicely set out).

‘Extra Special’ may have been their special Christmas range (check it out) with the word ‘extra’ special added with the endorsement of Leiths to make it stand out from the same-old, same-old products being offered by other supermarkets. Marks & Spencer are the ones that really started this approach and were very successful with it see:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/02/marks-and-spencer-food-pudding-advert-this-is-not-just-any_n_5751628.html

I certainly didn’t expect to see something like this Asda ad in the Daily Telegraph – and it had more of the look of M & S about it – in fact I think it was designed initially to make readers think it was M & S as there was just the Asda logo in the top right corner which took up just 1/80th of the whole advertisement. So probably intended to grab attention and then surprise everyone with the fact that this was not actually M & S but Asda!

@Abi – Take a look at the OBU Information Pack (there should be a link to it on our homepage or you can access it via ACCAglobal). About 6 or 8 months ago 3 mentors commented on how to approach this so use key words “structure of the research and analysis project” to find these posts and to get some ideas.

The research questions should follow on from these aims and objectives but they could be based on some of the 7 Ps (you do not have to have 7 questions though, just ones that you think will be particularly relevant – about 4 or 5 research questions total) along the lines of:

To investigate and research:

How does Asda use specific types of promotions to attract customers to its stores?

How does Asda broaden its stores’ appeal to enhance customer experience and encourage them to visit Asda regularly?

As mentioned previously I would also bring in a section in the analysis section about the Christmas campaign so I would introduce a comment and question in the research question section –

(a) To consider the importance of the Christmas / New Year marketing campaign for the major UK food retailers and review the media opinions of these campaigns.
(b) To assess the effects of the Christmas campaign, specifically:

How successful was Asda’s 2014 Christmas campaign in terms of revenue compared with some of the other supermarkets?

As Asda is part of Wal-Mart you could also consider how it has been instrumental in introducing the ‘Black Friday’ marketing campaign into Britain and see what information you can find in relation to increased sales from Black Friday (this and the Christmas turnover figures will form part of your evidence of how successful – or otherwise – its marketing strategies are)