Optical Distortion Inc. (odi) - Harvard University Business Case Analysis

Introduction

In 1962, a chicken farmer in Arizona found that some of his chickens developed a cataract. Amazingly, those with reduced vision seemed to eat less and were much easier to handle than ordinary chickens. Inspired from this accidental discovery, Robert D. Garrison, the father of Daniel Garrison, the present president and chief executive officer of Optical Distortion, Inc. (ODI) developed a product that could make a huge change in poultry industry – a contact lens for chickens. ODI lens makes the chickens partially blind to handle them easily for the farmers. This innovative product is about to come out to the world.

ODI's overall vision is to develop U.S. poultry industry, or in a wider sense, that of livestock through the company's product or future products. To narrow down our vision to be more specific, our objectives must be described. We fundamentally aim to improve overall livestock industry's productivity, but for now as a new company, ODI has several short term objectives to penetrate into the current market. In spring of 1975, ODI aims to enter into the market of one region in the U.S. In two years we will expand to the national level and have our product distributed all over the nation and help more U.S. farmers to increase the efficiency of egg production. Then ODI will develop and diversify new products and markets to be successful among fierce competition with future competitors. ODI will have a variety of marketing strategies to achieve mentioned objectives and furthermore, the vision of the company. STP strategy with an emphasis on pricing strategy and so forth will be discussed through this paper. In shorts, we are "Providing Goods for Your (the farmers') Good," and this phrase will be ODI's theme which covers from our vision, objective to specific strategies consistently and complementarily.

Segmentation

Based on the data of the characteristics of U.S. chicken farms at 1969, there are 293,340 farms (sales over $2,500) and they totally include chickens of 363,208,766. This market can be divided by two criteria.

At first, we applied the size of the firm which depends on the number of the chickens to divide our market. By the size of the firm, our customer market is divided into three groups; small farms have 10,000 or fewer birds, medium farms have 10,000 to 50,000 birds and large farms have over 50,000 birds. Small farms which are usually family operated have been declining at a rate about 25% per year. Medium farms are typically operated professionally and most likely deal with large corporate suppliers and purchaser of the farm's egg production. Large farms considered as a small manufacturing firm have contracted with regional offices of large grocery chains.

The market has a regional division, and we segmented it to three major areas. In pacific region, some states such