Posted on : 2023-01-15 21:20:39
Article : Good morning, Monday Management solution for TASK 225- In this market share up keep, even the most iconic brands and successful companies experience their fair share of hardship.
In our TASK part we have discussed on situations and corrective steps to follow when the brands skip their market share now in this solution part, we share with you how the iconic brands marketers played their strategies to revive tier brands market shares.
Starbucks — A Catch-All “Third Place” to a Quality Cup of Coffee
Howard Schultz had already changed the game by positioning Starbucks coffeehouses as a “third place” (home, work, Starbucks) for social time in our daily lives. The brand’s original positioning strategy proved a massive success and launched a global enterprise.
But by 2008, rapid expansion had made it difficult to scale the quality of service along with the number of their locations. The brand had also diluted its artisanal coffeehouse image by dabbling in non-coffee products (like music). The Great Recession was the last straw. More than 900 Starbucks stores closed while American consumers turned to cost-effective alternatives like McDonald’s to cope with their tighter budgets.
These factors all played a role in a significant brand repositioning to renew the coffee juggernaut’s status in the market. Starbucks launched its largest marketing campaign in company history, “coffee value and values,” to reassert the quality of their product and reassure consumers that it was worth the extra cost.
• “Beware a cheaper cup of coffee. It comes with a price.”
• “Starbucks or nothing. Because compromise leaves a really bad aftertaste.”
• “If your coffee isn’t perfect, we’ll make it over. If it’s still not perfect, you must not be in a Starbucks.”
It worked. By 2014, the company was back in the black with a record $16 billion in annual revenue. Starbucks offers one of the strongest examples of brand repositioning as a “what’s old is new again” strategy. They stripped a diluted, fragmented, or compromised core message back down to its roots (a really, really good cup coffee) and refreshed the brand’s value proposition in the process.
Old Spice — Smells Like Grandpa to “Smell Like a Man, Man”
Once upon a time, Old Spice was 70 years old, and so were its biggest fans. The new brand “Axe” had disrupted the men’s body wash market with sleek styling and fresh, energetic advertising. Meanwhile, in the public mindset, Old Spice was just...old.
Younger consumers barely noticed Old Spice before NFL player Isaiah Mustafa told us that “the tickets are now diamonds” and “anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. Hundreds of commercials and social videos later — including a hilarious real-time feud with Fabio over who would be the next brand spokesperson — Old Spice was once again a red-hot category leader. It only took six months for the ad campaign to boost sales of their body wash by 27%.
Business Insider reported a year after the launch of the “Smell Like a Man, Man” campaign that Old Spice had taught us all a valuable lesson: “A clever ad + smart use of social media can produce a fresh identity, even for a brand that many associate with their grandfather’s deodorant.”
End point- In free-market economies, competition leads to different companies owning a different sized piece of the pie, meaning that all companies will have a different market share of the product or service they sell. When a company loses its market share to a competitor, there are a few ways that they can try and gain it back. All the strategies the marketers utilise have their pros and cons and none are guaranteed to work, but they will start a company on the right path to becoming more competitive again.
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