A Marketing plan is a very important tool in showing the steps a business will undertake in achieving its marketing objectives. It is written to describe the business’ current market position and the marketing strategy to be used in the period that the market plan covers. McDonald’s being one of the best brands in the world aims at building through listening to its customers. A brand represents a company’s image to its customers. A company should therefore present itself in a consistent way.
Marketing strategies such as promotions and advertising are important in creating the colours, images and designs that give the brand its recognisable face. McDonald uses the Golden Arches logo to represent its brand (Pride and Ferrell, 2008).
McDonald products include hamburgers, cheeseburgers, soft drinks, desserts and chicken among others. Reacting to the changing customers tastes it continues to expand its menu in order to attract more customers by use of controlled experimentation. For example it once introduced a breakfast menu in order to utilize the physical plant.
The company also rolled out chicken McNuggets in 1980 (McDonald, 2008).
The company however faces some challenges like decrease in revenue and quick service market share. The quick service market only kept with inflation in the 1990s. McDonald has many competitors who include Burger King, Taco Bell and Wendy’s who reduced their margins by promotions and value pricing strategies. Sonic and Rally who attracted customers through a limited menu approach. The Chili’s and Olive Garden offered a more enticing dinner than the common Golden Arches.
The Essay on Marketing and Company
Tactics and Action Plan9 Product Action Plan9 Price Action Plan9 Place Action Plan9 Promotion Action Plan9 Monitoring Procedures10 Introduction Company G offers high quality, cost effective, reliable products that will improve the lives of consumers. The company has created a place in the industry by creating new and exciting electronics. Company G strives in meeting a goal of guaranteeing ...
In addition, McDonald’s success is also affected by legal and technological changes, economic, social factors, and the retail environment among others. McDonald realizes the importance of maintaining a friendly environment for the public. McDonald reduces its solid waste by use of brown paper bags which can be recycled, ensuring suppliers produce corrugated boxes that contain more recycled content. This reduces both the solid waste and build a market for recycled products. It now uses new paper-based wraps to hold sandwiches in place of polystyrene clamshell containers (Pride and Ferrell, 2008).
Marketing involves knowing what the customers need and require and finding better ways to meet these needs. This helps a company to create loyal customers. McDonald thus needs to look for its potential customers since not every one will be interested in McDonald’s products. Once the audiences are identified it has to create a marketing mix that is appealing to the customers. A marketing mix is a business tool used to come up with a successful mix of the right product, sold at the right price, in the right place while using the best promotion methods.
To have the best marketing mix, businesses have to ensure, that their products have the right features, the right price since consumers need to buy many products to gain great profit. The business must also ensure goods are in the right place at the right time and there must be successful promotion for customers to be aware of the availability and existence of the firms’ products. To determine the correct marketing mix the marketing department in McDonald need to analyse their customers’ information from market research.
It is important to know which products are well received, the prices that consumers are willing to pay, the TV programmes and newspapers consumers read and view, and finally the restaurants that are most visited. To identify this key information McDonalds need to have accurate market research. The buying patterns change as the economy and social attitudes change. McDonald should identify if their target customers are increasing or decreasing and whether their habits are likely to change in the future (McDonald, 2008).
The Business plan on Marketing Plan For Hypothetical Product-Based Company
Executive Summary This report contains a marketing plan for a new and affordable repair shop in the San Antonio market. The new shop will be launched in the market and will tend to all types of customer’s needs, such as; tune-ups, engine diagnostic (free), oil change, engine cleaning, will be an exclusive high end smart watch. The gold and platinum watch with marble dial will be launched. The use ...
Market research involves all factors that may affect buying decisions of consumers. In addition to the product itself other factors include, psychological factors for example, the image a company’s product conveys or the consumers’ feelings when purchasing the product. These factors are very important sometimes even more than the physical benefits of the product. Marketing helps McDonald to establish a prominent position in the customers’ mind. This is referred to as branding. It is important to retain people who have become customers since the number of customers is limited.
McDonalds’ restaurant has different customers, for example, teenagers, children, business customer and parents. All these visit restaurant for different reasons. McDonald need to research on these reasons and use the information to tailor communication to the specific groups’ needs. This will determine the type of product and services to be offered, prices charged, restaurants location and promotions created. To create a marketing strategy that will meet the needs of the market, McDonald must identify and analyse its strengths and weaknesses.
The analysis will involve the company’s products and their future appropriateness, employees’ quality and the level of their training to offer good customer services, the company’s system and their effectiveness, and the availability of financial resources for marketing (Pride and Ferrell, 2008).
A SWOT analysis is then done which involves combining the determined strengths and weaknesses with the markets’ opportunities and threats. This will help the company to determine what is required to increase chances of successful marketing.
McDonald restaurant must create a marketing strategy in order to determine how their objectives will be met. A company’s objective shows what the marketers want to achieve, guide their actions and also used in measuring the effectiveness of a marketing plan. McDonald’s uses long term objectives as milestones. These objectives are broken down into shorter-term measurable targets. Upon establishing the marketing objectives, ways of achieving them must be determined. The marketing strategy shows how objectives will be delivered, it explains the type of marketing actions and resources to be used, and their compatibility.
The Term Paper on Marketing Plan For A Herbal Company – Himalaya Herbals
The purpose of this document is to analyse the situation of Himalaya Herbals of Oregon and provide forecasts for future market and product innovations. We have developed organisational goals and objectives which stem from their “back to basics” philosophies’. After evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, we found that competition was the single biggest ...
With a good marketing strategy a marketing mix can be established. It consists of the four Ps, which are product, price, promotion and place. Product; when offering menu items to customers, it is important to remember that the customer has a variety of choices with regard to spending their money. McDonald should therefore emphasis on developing a menu which the customers want. However the needs of customers change over time, marketing should thus keep on monitoring customers’ preferences. To meet these changes McDonald has launched new products over time and should continue to do so.
This should be done carefully to avoid adverse effects on sales. McDonald sales of products vary at different times, the marketing type and resources used should also be different for the different products stage. Every company has a portfolio of products at different stage of its life cycle. For example McDonald’s options have grown in popularity while the Big Mac is at the maturity stage (Pride and Ferrell, 2008).
Price; the price charged should mainly be determined by a customer’s perception of value.
Using a low price as a marketing tool may make the customer to think the product is of low quality. Before setting the price the company should be aware of the brand and its integrity. Lowering the price also makes the competitors to do the same, hence demand and sales remain the same while the profit margin reduces. On the other hand Place should not just be about the physical location or points of distribution of the product. It involves management of several processes used to bring products to the final consumer (McDonald, 2008).
Promotion; this covers all types of marketing communication. Promotion methods include, advertising, sales promotion, merchandising, seminars, telemarketing and demonstrations among others. The skill in marketing communication should develop a campaign that uses these methods in a way that will provide the most effective results. The aim of marketing communications is to make the target consumers to react in a certain way. This may be to purchase the product, make a visit to the restaurant, recommend the product to a customer or increase hi/her purchases.
The Term Paper on New Product Launch Marketing Plan, Part II
The following is the second part to the iNKtopia product launch plan. The second part of the marketing plan consists of a detailed target market profile, including buying behaviors, decision motivators, and organizational target markets. The plan also includes steps to manage each stage of the product life cycle and tactical plans for the Four P’s. Finally, the second part of the marketing plan ...
McDonald’s should know more about its’ customers, this will make it possible communicate message that are appealing to the customers. It should communicate the right message to the right audience, through the right media. The media depends on the viewers, listeners, or readers and how much they resemble the audience (McDonald, 2008).
When the market strategy is established, different individuals are given the responsibility of implementing. The market feedback should also be taken to measure success against the short term target. McDonald has to have a tightly controlled marketing budget within which this process should be done.
