Omega Paw Marketing Case

After having a successful first year in business, Omega Paw is looking to grow quickly and target a much larger market.  Omega Paw has direct and indirect competition already in the market, so they will need to implement a marketing strategy and look into distribution techniques to increase sales and grow the company.  

The objective of Omega Paw is to increase sales to $1.7 million by the end of the company’s fiscal year, which is December 2012, $3 million by the following fiscal year end and by 2014 fiscal year end they hope to achieve $5.7 million in sales.

There are an estimated 84.2 million cats in North America. 74 Million in the United States and 10.2 million in Canada. The cat population has increased by 7 percent between 2010 and 2012 and was expected to grow at an annual rate of 3.6 percent for the next few years. The uptrend in cat ownership had to do with the ease of care, and maintenance for cats.

Omega Paw had segmented the cat ownership market into three segments. New pet owners (segment 1) made up 5 percent of the market. This segment was made up of consumers who had recently acquired a cat or kitten for the first time and needed all the pet care and maintenance products. They often did their own pet and product research, wanted good quality, long lasting products, and purchased these items at local pet stores or at the veterinarian’s office. This segment can be targeted online while consumers are doing online research for pet products. The second segment (segment 2) is the existing cat owner segment. These consumers had owned cats for some time, and had experience in caring for their pets and had traditional cat care and maintenance supplies. They purchased their supplies at a variety of locations including pets stores, veterinarian offices, household supply stores, and grocery stores. This segment represents the consumer most likely to purchase Omega Paw’s product, it also represents the largest segment. This segment can be targeted online or in-store near products that are similar. The last segment is known as the gray zone (segment 3). This segment is made up of the following 15 percent of consumers who lived in the country and owned a variety of outdoor pets. These consumers only concerned themselves with purchasing specific products other than food, as these cats were free to roam outside. This segment will be hard to target, as their animals will probably be outside most of the time and not using an inside litter box.