Handout Marketing Strategy & Practice Group

Handout Marketing Strategy & Practice Group B (Lucas, Thomas, Lara) – Soundcloud case

1. How to segment the market for music? What is the current target segment of Soundcloud? Try to come up with effective segmentation and consider what is at stake (Yankelovich & Meer, 2006).

Segmentation for Music Industry [pic 1]

[pic 2]

2. Come up with a clear customer value proposition for Soundcloud (Anderson, Narus, & van Rossum, 2006)—what do you want to be your core competitive advantage on the market? What do you offer/want to offer what your competitors do not have? How do you plan to achieve it? (hint: think here about points of parity and points of difference)

The proposition consists of Music Culture –meaning that Soundcloud provides the biggest catalogue of music to date. Besides well-known artist its main feature is to give emerging artists and alternative fans a platform where they can stream this new urban music. Furthermore, in contrast to competitors, Soundcloud relies on a community, where user can directly interact with their favorite artist. Which provides an opportunity for both artists & customer.

3. Conduct a SWOT analysis for Soundcloud

4. Provide some recommendations based on the SWOT for (a) future strategy(ies) for Soundcloud to become profitable.

• they need to catch up with trends both in the market
• giving a platform for a great number of newcomers which benefits the music industry greatly, but Soundcloud should also focus on mainstream trends
• Music and media piracy in general are a continuously talked about topic these days, which also very much threatens Soundcloud. Users are often not controlled too much of what it uploaded to the internet, so that music piracy and copyright issues could be easily associated with Soundcloud and its management.