Portland Drake Beverages

Advertising and Sales Promotion Management

ADM3326 A

Professor Michael Guolla

Creative Plan

Energizing Crescent Pure’s Positioning

Spencer Bull | 7367360

Marie-Pier Harvey | 7485615

Amy Lam | 7289267

Tarek Mansour | 6805903

Maxime Trepanier | 6455203

November 9, 2015

Introduction

This report serves to provide Portland Drake Beverages (PDB) with a recommendation on how to solve the marketing communication issues that their recently acquired product, Crescent Pure (Crescent), is currently facing. To begin, the report will highlight the key issue that PDB needs to address followed by an analysis to understand factors that affect the solution. Lastly, the report will provide PDB with a recommendation focused on various promotion management decisions.

Situation Analysis

The key marketing communication issue that PBD is facing is that the Crescent brand requires a new positioning. The market of non-alcoholic functional beverages can be divided into various segments, with sports-drink and energy-drink being the most relevant to Crescent based on its hydrating and energizing elements.

Market Size and Growth

The sports-drink market was estimated to be $6.3 billion, while the energy-drink market was estimated to be $8.5 billion around the same time. In addition, the energy-drink market also had a higher projected growth with a figure of $13.5 billion by 2018, compared to a weaker $9.58 billion projection of sports-drinks by 2017. This $2.2 billion difference is significant when considering which positioning strategy would maximize PDB’s revenues.

Demand Trends

Recent market research has shown that energy-drink consumers are looking for lower level of caffeine and purer ingredients, while sport-drink consumers are looking for lower sugar in their beverages. Given this information, it is clear that a new opportunity exists to gain market share by offering a healthy alternative to one of these two categories of drinks.

Consumer Profile

For both categories, the purchase decision is thought to be low-involvement, as they spend little time during the information search step. In fact, news stories indicated that 32% of consumers over 18 years old have drank an energy drink in the past 6 months. A similar level of frequency can be assumed for consumers of sports drinks. This frequency indicates that the consumers can be thought to be between “routine response behaviour” to “limited problem solving” in the continuum of rational consumer decision making behaviour; However, in the demand trends, it is highlighted that consumers of energy and sports drinks are spending more time in the alternative evaluation stage, as they are becoming more concerned about health risks associated with certain brands. In conclusion, PDB must consider the fact that both energy and sports drink consumers are relatively low involvement, but this involvement has been growing in recent years due to health concerns.