Brita Product Case Analysis

Situation Analysis:

In 1988, Charlie Couric, marketing executive of The Clorox Company, suggested a deficit spending proposal to Clorox to acquire the marketing rights for the Brita pitcher-and-filter water purification system in the United States. His key argument was based on the cash flow from the repeat purchase of filters necessary to maintain the home-based water purification system.

A decade later, Brita had grown to become one of Clorox's biggest brands. Brita had created a home water purification industry worth $350 million and it accounted for over a 70% share of the revenues. During the 1990s, Brita has built its marketing position using the strategy "established in class, first in mass, and alone in grocery". However, in 1999, with the launch of a new product by a small competitor, PUR, Brita had to make decisions for the future. There are new advances being made and the market was becoming more interested in faucet-mounted filters versus pitchers. The small company, PUR, had emerged with its faucet-filter system that mounts directly to consumer kitchen faucet. The new product offers health and convenience benefits that the Brita pitcher cannot.

At this point, Brita had three choices.

• They could continue to emphasize their water pitchers.

• They could begin to endorse a faucet-mounted system.

• Or they could shift their emphasis to increase filter sales versus pitchers.

Solution Analysis

The solution is to launch faucet-mount filters at the price of $39.99 and at the same time maintaining pitcher filter sales. Now PUR owns most market share from the faucet mount market, but with appropriate marketing solutions it is likely to be overcome. In this case, the Brita Company should target younger people aging between 18 and 44 because one survey shows 82% are health conscious and as people gets older, the degree of concern about water is declined. Also, it should target western U.S which showed stronger interest in system on faucet than other regions of country. Also, according to the case, there are still a lot of people not using any filtering device (about 35% of respondents in a 1999 survey) so finding new target market for faucet mounts is highly possible.

In the case of pitchers, there can be high demand of pitchers such as college or university classes so I suggest targeting young people attending to college our university by convincing them to buy pitchers through distribution channel of mass merchandisers such as Target and Walmart. The Brita Company already utilizes this channel to sell standard pitcher. Also, in the case of faucet- mounts, I suggest to redirect target market as whole households with aggressive advertising strategy and promotion. As