Discuss about the Emilia Store for Marketing Strategy and Management.

Augustin Ray-Celebrated European Businessman

Camilo & Maria Vega-Friends of Augustin Ray

Nicomedes Mallo- Board chairman

Emilia, a century old retailer store is the store in the case study, with its main characters being Augustin Ray, Camilo, Maria Vega & Nicomedes Mallo. In the case it is explained here it is mentioned that Emilia has been going through various strategic changes in terms of its pricing, its marketing & promotions and the look and feel of the store. The store is being renovated to widen its customer base, get youngsters to the store and increase the revenue. The present leader of the store, Augustin Ray is headstrong about his vision and wants to drive the store in that direction, but the results have proved that the strategy of Augustin Ray is not working.

Augustin Ray is of the opinion that discounting is not the best way to bring customers in the stores; it is like cheating the customers by artificially raising the price and then offering a discount on the same and making profits. In his opinion this is misleading and cheating towards the customers. He is extremely unsupportive of this marketing strategy. He has suggested some measures to counter the effect of discounting by bring in the concept of straight talk, renovating the entire place to lure youngsters and also the strategy of everyday low prices. But all these strategies seem to fall flat, the management is extremely worried about it and have advised Augustin to take corrective actions as seems fit to the store. The falling revenue in two quarters and the drop in footfall is a big concern. The dilemma is what has to be done now, in order to get the sales up and also increase the footfall in the store, at the same time put up a strong show in front of the competitors and de mask the effect of online sales.

In my opinion, none of the strategies suggested by either Augustin & The board members are wrong, or futile, the implementation and execution of the strategies is something which has to be looked at.

At the end of case study, by some experts, it has been suggested that product is a big differentiator in sales. Taking a clue from the same, Emilia should focus on building its brand image as the store which provides the high quality product. In all the categories of its product offering, store should ace and not compromise on its product offering. It has been over and over said and in the history it has been mentioned, a customer always pays a price for a product of high quality and standards (Derdenger & Kumar, 2013)

Presentation of the problem or the dilemma

Target Audience-Emilia in the start has its target audience as old aunties or midwives, who used to shop for their families or kids. This image has to be broken and a new branding and a communication strategy have to be used to break such image. Augustin is absolutely right in redoing the store, make it more contemporary, and get youngsters in the store by matching their taste, a brilliant strategy implemented by him. Breaking the trend is something that everyone should focus on, and Augustin is absolutely right with it. He has understood that if the store has to grow in numbers and increase the revenue, they must and should widen their target audience. The audience targeting is a very important concept in marketing, hence selectively targeting the audience and moderating the look and feel of the store, working on the prices, and couple of more strategies will definitely get numbers on the board (Rock ,2014)

Marketing Mix- Emilia should work on its marketing mix. Marketing mix helps to define a clear cut marketing goal and the strategy the store is looking at, hence it should be done on high priority. Focussing on 7P- Product, price, place, promotion , physical evidence, people & processes will make the store realize its goals and objectives and a clear cut strategy to achieve them (Baker, 2014)

Pricing strategy- As explained in the case, the store since its start has been offering deep discounts for its customers, the store believed strongly that to gain a customer they need to offer him discount. In the process, they have kept on offering huge discounts, which ultimately led to eating into their profit margins. This type of strategy can only be adopted by players who have deep pockets and they want themselves to be positioned as a discounting store. A strict no-no for Emilia. On the contrary, the store should come up with season end sales, weekend sales, stock clearance sales, festival sales etc.; this would be more beneficial as the customers connect more with the brand who understand the needs of customers. Such occasions would make them believe that although the product is of high priced, the store does not want them to loose on the store offering due to its heavy pricing, and thus by offering discount they are doing them a favour. It goes a long way in building a connect and relationship with the customers (Armstrong, Kotler, Harker & Brennan, 2015).Also, the store should work around the concept of bundle pricing, which says that the store should bundle its product together and offer it to the customers, it is a great improvement over discounting being offered to the customers. The bundling of the product though has to be really thought about, as to which product should be bundled with, and what value will it offer to the customer (Giri & Sharma, 2014)

Presentation of different options and Pros and cons of each option

Marketing & communication- Several times it has been pointed that the store is really not working towards its communication and marketing strategy. Communication is the key concept in customer sales; the communication should be out in the open for its customers and be very clear of its objective. Once the goals of communication are identified, it becomes very easy to work around it.Communication should be spread by combining various channels of marketing, online, bill boards, newspaper ads announcing its sale day, promotion & offers, discounts, newsletters, new product offering. Once the customer is engaged with the store and understands the communication brand is offering, the trust and relationship will play its role (Argenti, 2015)

Feedback: Customer’s feedback is really important in retail business. The store should really listen to grievance of its customer, its feedback and also monitor the feedback given on the store’s social pages (Serrat, 2017) Once you are listening to your customer’s, they will eventually realize that they are important to the store and store cares about their needs and concern. And such customers will only help the store come up with its next strategy (Moreira, 2017)

Conclusion

In the end, I would like to reiterate, reckless sales and clearances would give the store a jump in the revenue only at the start, and it will not be successful in its entire journey. Hence it’s very important for the board to understand this thing. Focussing on the 7P’s of marketing mix, would make the store understand of its entire marketing strategy and working in that direction would help them to constantly rework and rethink of how to lure the customers (Zeng, Dasgupta & Weinberg, 2016). Store should understand what is the target audience and whom they want to target, accordingly use the pricing strategy in line with the audience. A customer will always pay for the product, in which he sees a value, hence, I would propose a value based pricing , instead of cost based pricing and discounts. Discounts should be offered only to make the sales superfluous, and not make it an everyday activity. Heavy discounts also have a tendency to turn the customers negative about the store, as the present day customer is really smart, he understands the tactics and strategy behind the discounting, thus too much discounting would make their trust vanish on the store, and also would make them habitual to discount, which in the longer run would be devastating for the store (Nagle, Hogan & Zale, 2016)

References:

Derdenger, T. and Kumar, V., 2013. The dynamic effects of bundling as a product strategy. Marketing Science, 32(6), pp.827-859.

Rock, D., 2014. Quiet leadership. HarperCollins e-books.

Baker, M.J., 2014. Marketing strategy and management. Palgrave Macmillan.

Giri, B.C. and Sharma, S., 2014. Manufacturer’s pricing strategy in a two-level supply chain with competing retailers and advertising cost dependent demand. Economic Modelling, 38, pp.102-111.

Argenti, P.A., 2015. Corporate communication. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Moreira, M.E., 2017. Incorporating Customer Feedback. In The Agile Enterprise (pp. 161-173). Apress.

Zeng, X., Dasgupta, S. and Weinberg, C.B., 2016. The competitive implications of a “no-haggle” pricing strategy when others negotiate: Findings from a natural experiment. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 33(4), pp.907-923.

Nagle, T.T., Hogan, J. and Zale, J., 2016. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: New International Edition. Routledge.

Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015. Marketing: an introduction. Pearson Education.

Serrat, O., 2017. The future of social marketing. In Knowledge solutions (pp. 119-128). Springer Singapore.