What Marketing Action Should Kolander Takes Based on the Research Findings?

What marketing action should Kolander takes based on the research findings?

30190946        Suen Ka Lai

The New England Soup Company entered the retail market with Kolander’s Chowder brand. Unfortunately, the last five years had been a period of level and then declining sales for Kolander’s Chowder. Since 38% of The New England Soup Company’s sales volume went to the retail market, so the decline in sales damage the market share and profit of it. As a consequence, they are planning to take the marketing actions to figure out the problem.

To begin with, there are three aims that we want to achieve are recover the lost distribution of the brand, switch customers from competitive brands back to the Kolander’s brand and to improve the market position in this market action.

According to Appendix a, new competitors occurred in 1986 and 1987. In the stores of stocking canned Chowder brands, Kolander dropped from 94% in 1987 to 86% in 1988 while Cape Cod raised from 20% to 36%, Fisherman’s Delight increased from 4% to 18% in the same period of time. This is one of the evidence that these competitors threated Kolander. The reason is that both brands were produced locally and appeared very similar in formulation to Kolander’s chowder and with lower selling price.

The price range of retail canned chowder soup is $46-53 in 1987, the mean of the price in 1989 is around $49.3, that suited the price range $47-53 of Kolander. In 1989, Kolander’s prices range is wider but cheaper, after they adjust the price, it is still a little expensive than its competitors. Customers are price sensitive. To increase the sales of Kolander, the first step is to draw the attention from the customers in price. Not to set a lower selling price, but to make customers think it is worth for the value of the product. We can offer some discount to the trade customers that according to the specific segmentation, so as to recover the lost distribution of the brand.

As for the problem of similar formulation, the research firm found out that chowder users preferred chowder that was thicker and creamier than the current Kolander’s Chowder brand formulation. So for the product, Kolander can provide a brand new formulation. A creamy version and extreme creamy version of Kolander were tested with the original Kolander’s Chowder, Cape Cod and Fisherman’s Delight Chowder. The sample size is 200 that were selected from four geographic locations representative of New England market area. And the procedure resulted in a more reliable measure in the taste test. According to the table two of appendix b, the results of this analysis is people most preferred the new flavor-Kolander’s Creamy that scored 2.4(1.00=most preferred), better than Fisherman’s Delight 2.8 and Cape Cod 2.9. The recommendation of the taste test is to change the current Kolander’s Chowder formulation to version 1-creamy. Then it might improve the market position of Kolander’s Chowder and recapture a significant share of sales lost to the Cape Cod and Fisherman’s Delight brands.