Reading 1

Unit 3- Reading 1

Page 34

They Know What You Want

With her shopping list in hand, a supermarket customer is facing the challenge of selecting a breakfast cereal for her family. The shelves are stocked with as many as 200 varieties. Should she buy wheat, corn, rice, bran, or oat cereal? Sweetened or plain? With added vitamins? With a plastic toy in the box for her kids? Or should she buy theone she has a discount coupon for, or the one with the funny ad on TV, or the one that is on sale?

INFLUENCING SHOPPERS’ CHOICES

The shopper’s ultimate choice is likely to be determined by some factor other than taste. Marketers create clever ways to persuade shoppers to buy one product instead of another. Often these have little to do with the food inside the boxes. Instead, they are only to attract shoppers.

DEFINING MARKETING

Marketing is a company’s plan for selling a product. A marketing plan, administered by a marketing director, includes what to name the product, how to advertise it, how to price it, how to package it, and how to convince customers to buy it. In short, the goal of marketing is to channel a shopper’s choices toward a single, specific product.

A marketing plan often begins with a survey to determine who is most likely to buy a certain type of product. Factors such as the sex, age, education, and income of future customers are considered. Then, a marketing team designs a plan aimed at a specific sector of the population, the group that they think is most likely to buy the product.

SELLING A NEW PRODUCT

Selling a cereal, a garden tool, a ballpoint pen, and a designer wristwatch will obviously call for different marketing techniques. Good health may sell cereals but not pens; while humor may sell pens, but not watches. Reliable performance sells garden tools and pens, but not cereals. Rich people buy expensive watches. Students buy pens. Marketing teams must consider such factors when they design a marketing campaign.

Suppose that a company has developed an innovative new product: a powder made from dried fruit. When mixed with warm water, the powder becomes a creamy fruit sauce for babies. Although babies will be the ones to eat the product, it is their parents who will buy it. The company’s marketing plan will be aimed at the parents, specifically the mothers.

SELECTING A SLOGAN

A survey indicates that most mothers have two top priorities:

1. They want their babies to be healthy.

2. They want to be good mothers.

Marketers use this information to create a name for the new baby food: Healthy Start. They also create a marketing slogan: Give your baby a Healthy Start. This Slogan has both an explicit and an implicit message. It explicitly directs a mother to feed a Healthy Start meal to her baby. It also implies that this will make her a good mother because she will be giving her baby a healthy start in life.

ADVERTISING THE NEW PRODUCT

The marketing team then decides how and where to sell Healthy Start baby fruit. They must decide where to publish advertisements and what the ads should say. Maybe the ads will invoke the authority of a famous baby doctor to emphasize the health appeal. The ads will certainly emphasize things like good taste, easy preparation, and high nutrition. Maybe the ads will include coupons for free samples.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Maybe the marketing team will try something innovative, like offering a Healthy Start college scholarship to a lucky winner. The team must also decide if the focus will be on domestic sales or if the baby food will be exported to foreign countries. A design company is already designing an attractive package for the product. The marketing team will test the name,slogan, ads, and packaging by showing them to mothers and surveying their responses.

Finally, the new product will be placed on supermarket shelves. If the marketing was effective, mothers will select Healthy Start from the dozens of baby foods on the shelves.