retail marketing mix

E-Branding

Planning Your Store Design

The purpose of retail store design is to create is to create a comfortable environment that is unique in the mind of your customers.

1.    What type of retail store format do you plan to operate?
2.    What category of merchandise will your retail store sell?
3.    What is your target segment of customers your retail store will cater to?

Your retail store might sell food, general merchandise or might be a specialty store. Your retail format might be a hypermarket, super centre, supermarket, superstore, department store, wholesale club, or it may be a franchise, or a themed store selling a single brand, or a single line of merchandise.

When you have defined your store type and your target market, you will need to decide on the elements to establish your store identity:

1. Layout
2. Décor
3. Fixtures
4. Colors
5. Lightning

The goal of any retail store design is to make the customers feel good the moment they enter, and to increase the time they spend browsing in your retail store. The elements of a successfully designed and executed retail store design will influence your shoppers’ behavior.

It is important to understand that a retail store design must evolve to remain relevant to your customers, and to reflect their lifestyle. Retailers who are not ready to remodel or change their store design in keeping with the current trends will be left behind. Successful retail store designs and concepts produce more sales and higher profits, and enjoy higher customer loyalty.

When the retail store design has been established, the next step is to focus on your merchandising. The type of retail store format determines the merchandise mix. Depending on the store format and size, you might be selling anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 different merchandise. Known as SKU, each SKU will be assigned a PLU (price look-up) code. This will enable your POS system to track your sales per unit of merchandise and your inventory levels.

The layout of your retail store will direct the flow of customer traffic when they shop. Using strategic placement of merchandise categories, shoppers will be exposed to the merchandise you sell. The placement and arrangement of your merchandise plays a vital role in achieving a profitable retail operation. The merchandise placement from various categories should flow together seamlessly. Shoppers are directed to merchandise from different categories, but are considered related.

The arrangement might look something like this; home décor, bed sheets, blankets, pillows, floor mats, curtains, window shades, bedside lamps, wall clocks, bathroom accessories. The merchandise from various categories can be organized in ways that uses suggestive selling to your shoppers.
The height and density of the display, use of POS materials, contributes to your profitability. Consider the type of display and fixtures to use in your retail store:

• Block displays
• Showroom style
• Shelf or gondolas
• Offer bins
• Check-out displays

Your merchandise and merchandise displays have to be visually appealing, organized and properly stocked. It should be well maintained and cleaned. Changing your feature displays often will increase the entertainment factor when shoppers visit your store.

The way your retail store is designed, and the way you display your merchandise to complement your store layout creates your unique identity to your shoppers. By cultivating a store identity, it gives your store a personality, and increases repeat patronage.

How the Internet Is Changing Advertising

Being Different

With consumers being bombarded by advertising 100 times a day, the way you serve your customers must be different in order to just be noticed. You must be different in everything you say and do. Being different is standing on the side of the customer.

Let’s face it, being pretty good isn’t good enough anymore. Consumers have changed, have retailers kept up? Today’s customers are:

• More selective where they shop and shop at fewer outlets.
• Have less time to shop
• More sensitive to price and more demanding

Today’s retailer has to be either;

• The Biggest
• The Cheapest
• The Widest Selection
• The Fastest or Quickest
• The Easiest

If you’re not aiming to be the best in your niche, your customers are going to leave you. Look at the big names retailers that have closed doors in recent years. If a country’s national airline and wind up, nobody can afford to sit back and take it easy. Look at Wal-Mart. Are they the biggest company in the industry, where customers can find the lowest price? Do they have the lowest operating cost per dollar sale in the industry? You can’t have everyday low price without everyday low cost. Look at what you can do to stand out. Write down your sales or marketing ideas. Let it sit overnight and look at them again. Expand on them. Don’t be afraid to get wild and unorthodox, you can always scale back. A lot of the time in retailing bigger is better.

25 Best Indian Brand Slogans

This is my pick of 25 best Indian Slogans

1. Pepsi : Yehi hain Right Choice Baby

2. Thums Up : Taste The Thunder

3. Surf : Daag Acche hain

4. Tata Safari : Reclaim Your Life

5. Asian Paints : Har Khar Kuchch Kahta hein

6. Air Deccan : Simplifly

7. Rasna : I love you Rasna

8.Frooti : Fresh N Juicy / Why Grow Up

9.Coca Cola : Thanda Matlab Coca Cola

10. Raymond's : The Complete Man

11. Bajaj Pulsar : Definitely Male

12. Dairy Milk : Swad Zindagi Ka

13. Peter England : The Honest Shirt

14.Bingo : No Confusion, Great Combination

15. Boost : Boost is the secret of our energy

16 Polo : The mint with a hole

17. Lifebuoy : Thandurusti hain vaham

18. Ceat : Born Tough

19.MRF : Tyres With Muscle

20.Havelles RCB : Shock Laga Kya

21.Idea : An Idea can Change your life

22. Hutch : Where ever you go , our network follows

23. Maggi : Taste Bhi, Health Bhi ( Ketchup : Its Different)

24. Onida : Neighbor's Envy , Owner's Pride

25. Kingfisher : The King of Good Times

Tesco: Homeplus Subway Virtual Store (Movie)

History of Branding

What is marketing

Social Media Marketing in 3 minutes

What is Marketing ROI?

Big FMCG sales come in small packages

LUX soap at Rs 10, Good Day biscuit packet at Rs 5, Nestea premix ice tea pack at Rs 2. These are some of the most popular offers in the consumer products market where companies expect low-priced units to account for more than 40% of their total sales this year.

With rising prices of food and commodity products forcing India’s huge middle class market to lap up low-unit packs of soaps and detergents, shampoos, biscuits and snack foods more than ever before, companies such as Hindustan Unilever (HUL), ITC, Britannia, Frito-Lay, Godrej, CavinKare, Dabur and Nestle are banking on these ‘magic price points’ to push volumes. Last year, such packs accounted for 25-30% of their sales.
   

“The Rs 5 and Rs 10 price points in India continue to be magical in providing affordability and accessibility across a wide variety of foods,” says Vinita Bali, CEO of Britannia Industries, which recently introduced Good Day biscuits in Rs 5 packs.

    This is because most Indian households spend a large chunk of their disposable income on food, and they have to adjust their expenses on discretionary items when the prices of sugar or dal rise, she says.

    The price of sugar, which is also a raw material for biscuit and confectionery makers, has doubled from Rs 17/kg to Rs 35 over the past one year.

    Nestle has introduced Nestea, its premixed ice-tea, in refill packs of Rs 2 and Rs 10. Till now, the brand was only available in packs of Rs 75. FMCG’s rural focus drives small size sales

    PEPSICO’S snack foods arm, Frito-Lay, has started advertising its Kurkure brand in packs of Rs 3 and Rs 5. “We are trying to recruit new consumers and drive category penetration on Kurkure with price-pack play,” says Deepika Warrier, marketing director of Frito-Lay. Small packs will account for about one-third of the firm’s business, she says.

    While the slowdown in economy and inflationary pressure have impacted the disposable income in the hands of people, another factor driving the low-price unit growth is the increasing penetration into rural areas and the bottom-of-the-pyramid market.

    “There is so much unexplored potential in rural areas. Keeping low-price points is crucial to get into thesemarkets,” says Dalip Sehgal, managing director of Godrej, which is selling its No. 1 soap, Expert hair colour and Nupur henna at the Rs 5 and Rs 10 price points.

    Godrej is strengthening its distribution by tapping new channels like barbers and salons to push its shaving creams and talc and advertising its low-price units both regionally and nationally, he adds.

    CavinKare, which began the sachet revolution by selling Re 1 shampoo packs in rural India in early 1980s, says sachet shampoo sales have accelerated over the past few months from 70% to over 80% of the Rs 2,400-crore shampoo market.
   

“Small packs are growing faster because they drive penetration specially in rural markets and offer convenience of use. We have not seen much upgradation from sachets to bottles,” says V Ramesh, executive director of CavinKare, which sells Nyle and Chik shampoos in 50 paise and Re 1 packs.
   

Small packs help attract new users into a category, says V S Sitaram, COO of Dabur India, which recently rolled out Hajmola in 50 paise packets and Amla hair oil in Re 1 sachets. Low-priced packs contribute close to 35% of total sales of Dabur that also owns Vatika and Chyawanprash.
   

Both Hindustan Unilever and ITC are now focusing their advertising for Lux and Vivel soap brands, respectively, on the Rs 10 price point instead of brand attributes.
   

According to Cadbury India’s director for marketing Sanjay Purohit, the growth of lowprice units is led by a marketneed to encourage consumption and push growth in the smaller markets. The chocolates and confectionery maker has launched a Rs 2 version of its flagship brand Cadbury Dairy Milk, called CDM Shots, and will soon introduce smaller packs of its premium brand of chocolates, Bournville.
   

Analysts feel the trend will force companies increase volume discounts and consumer promotion schemes to push sales of larger units. But even then, the small will keep getting bigger, as the market penetrates and competition tightens.
   

“We expect low-pack units to become the highlight of the industry, with competition across categories intensifying. Downtrading and downpricing (weight reduction rather than price hike) is likely to become a reality, with a focus on sustaining volume growth and protecting market share,” says Anand Shah, FMCG analyst at broking and advisory firm Angel Broking.
   

Interestingly, the expansion of low-price units — a popular phenomenon in emerging and developing countries — does not favour the country’s nascent organised retail sector. More than 70% of low-unit packs are sold through kirana, or mom-and-pop stores, that constitutes almost 95% of the total retail market.

An introduction to Google AdWords

Ikea Mattress Display Team

The Coca Cola Friendship Machine

SMO

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website:

1. Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites.  Many sites are "static" – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront.  To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.  To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards.  From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.   
5. Encourage the mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).  YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.  Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

There are many other "rules" and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated.  In the meantime we are always on the lookout for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking.  Perhaps we may even see the rise of entire groups or agencies devoted to SMO in the future …

SOCIAL MEDIA TIP

Social Media Marketing

Why Talking Will Always Beat Shouting in Social 

Media...

There's been a lot of debate on the value of social media. After all, it's easy to argue about the potential of social media as a powerful sales channel. The ability to communicate with so many people instantly is like catnip to marketers and business owners alike—driving a gold rush that has spawned innumerable "social media experts."

Despite this excitement, there remains much controversy about the proper way to sellwithin the social landscape. Even the gatekeepers themselves (the major social networks), struggle to properly monetize their communities. So the debate of social media's efficacy wages on. 

Initial excitement is often followed by frustrated divestment, leading to false conclusions about the potential for marketing in the social sphere. These initial assessments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of social audiences. False conclusions about the value of social media are not telling of social media's true potential, but illustrate instead how ineffective it can be to apply traditional marketing initiatives within non-traditional environments. 

Put simply, the social landscape is not typically an effective direct sales channel. It's an opportunity to engage with potential customers. In order to be successful within social media, a paradigm shift is required— a deliberate change in mindset to understand one very simple fact: People buy from those they know and trust. 

By teaching your audience, entertaining them, or providing a resource to share with their friends, you create value. Even more powerfully, through consistency, you build trust. 

Content then becomes your most powerful tool for forging relationships and building a loyal following. The most basic goal of marketing with content is to nourish visitors — to give them what your competitors can't or won't, to educate them, inspire them, excite them. Creating content gives audiences an opportunity to engage with your business, to interact with it, and give feedback. It's the impetus for the conversations and dialogues that can build trust in a brand over the long term. 

Instead of seeing social media users as a faceless mass for you to hawk your wares, they instead become potential fans of your brand, people you can give to, and learn from. Finding ways to become valuable to these audiences becomes the focus. When this becomes the crux of each marketing initiative, you begin to innovate in ways that are helpful and valuable. 

By shifting your point of view, it's easy to see social media as a place rife with opportunity once again. It's an incredibly deep space from which savvy businesses can mine their perfect audience. Over time, social media marketing can only be successful if audiences can be created and sustained that exist outside of the social networks. Great content has the power to bring social audiences to your website—but this traffic becomes meaningless if user engagement ends here. Long-term success happens if, and only if, you are able to entice visitors into future interactions with your business. 

As Director of Marketing at a digital agency, I see first hand the impact of internal marketing strategies that revolve around content creation. In order to achieve results, we're committed to the consistent production of remarkable content and spend a great deal of our time finding ways to bring new audiences closer to our brand. In particular, we focus specifically on:

• Social Audience Growth (Twitter followers and Facebook fans)
• Encouraging On-site Interaction with Content (commenting and sharing)
• Newsletter Subscriber Growth (email subscribers)

We rely on social media as a primary point of interaction, and count on social users to help spread our message and the content we create. We’ve built our business on these inbound strategies, which are currently responsible for 90% of our lead flow. 

Most businesses put the cart before the horse. They see a huge market and assume that market is eager to buy. This is the wrong approach for most businesses in most situations. To find long-term, sustainable success online, build an engaged and loyal audience first. Refine and build this audience through social media. Use content to entice them, engage with them, and build their trust. Continue to cultivate this audience and cater to this audience, and you’ll create an asset with enormous long-term value.

Marketing Mix

Four ‘P’s

The ‘four Ps’ consist of the following:

• Product – A product is seen as an item that satisfies what a consumer needs or wants. It is a tangible good or an intangible service. Intangible products are service based like the tourism industry & the hotel industry or codes-based products like cell phone load and credits. Tangible products are those that can be felt physically. Typical examples of mass-produced, tangible objects are the motor car and the disposable razor. A less obvious but ubiquitous mass produced service is a computer operating system.

Every product is subject to a life-cycle including a growth phase followed by a maturity phrase and finally an eventual period of decline as sales falls. Marketers must do careful research on how long the life cycle of the product they are marketing is likely to be and focus their attention on different challenges that arise as the product moves through each stage.

The marketer must also consider the product mix. Marketers can expand the current product mix by increasing a certain product line’s depth or by increase the number of product lines. Marketers should consider how to position the product, how to exploit the brand, how to exploit the company’s resources and how to configure the product mix so that each product complements the other. The marketer must also consider product development strategies.

• Price – The price is the amount a customer pays for the product. The price is very important as it determines the company’s profit and hence, survival. Adjusting the price has a profound impact on the marketing strategy, and depending on the price elasticity of the product, often; it will affect the demand and sales as well. The marketer should set a price that complements the other elements of the marketing mix.

When setting a price, the marketer must be aware of the customer perceived value for the product. Three basic pricing strategies are: market skimming pricing, marketing penetration pricing and neutral pricing. The ‘reference value’ (where the consumer refers to the prices of competing products) and the ‘differential value’ (the consumer’s view of this product’s attributes versus the attributes of other products) must be taken into account.

• Promotion – represents all of the methods of communication that a marketer may use to provide information to different parties about the product. Promotion comprises elements such as: advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.

Advertising covers any communication that is paid for, from cinema commercials, radio and Internet advertisements through print media and billboards. Public relations is where the communication is not directly paid for and includes press releases, sponsorship deals, exhibitions, conferences, seminars or trade fairs and events. Word-of-mouth is any apparently informal communication about the product by ordinary individuals, satisfied customers or people specifically engaged to create word of mouth momentum. Sales staff often plays an important role in word of mouth and public relations.

• Place – refers to providing the product at a place which is convenient for consumers to access. Place is synonymous with distribution. Various strategies such as intensive distribution, selective distribution, exclusive distribution, franchising can be used by the marketer to complement the other aspects of the marketing mix.

Four ‘C’s

The Four Cs model is more consumer-oriented and attempts to better fit the movement from mass marketing to niche marketing.

• Product part of the Four Ps model is replaced by Consumer or Consumer Models, shifting the focus to satisfying the consumer needs. Another C replacement for Product isCapable. By defining offerings as individual capabilities that when combined and focused to a specific industry, creates a custom solution rather than pigeon-holing a customer into a product.

• Pricing is replaced by Cost reflecting the total cost of ownership. Many factors affect Cost, including but not limited to the customer’s cost to change or implement the new product or service and the customer’s cost for not selecting a competitor’s product or service.

• Promotions feature is replaced by Communication which represents a broader focus than simply Promotions. Communications can include advertising, public relations, personal selling, viral advertising, and any form of communication between the firm and the consumer.

• Placement is replaced by Convenience. With the rise of internet and hybrid models of purchasing, Place is becoming less relevant. Convenience takes into account the ease of buying the product, finding the product, finding information about the product, and several other factors.

How Social Media Can Help Your Business

by ADMIN on AUGUST 29, 2011

Everyone is jumping into the social media bandwagon with just only one aim and that is to develop their business initiatives in the respective fields of expertise. The growth of social media platforms and the presence of new ones itself is a proof of the fact that social media is growing in an infinite speed. Well, how can your business benefit out of it?

A more personal business experience

Today, people are not just looking for a formal buyer-seller relationship but they want an environment that is more informal yet interactive for business dealings. By creating an atmosphere which allows the prospective buyers to voice their opinions and post their suggestions, social media platforms can be used as venues for sharing info, videos, pictures and striking a great rapport with them. Subsequently, gaining the trust of the high quality target customer base makes lead conversion easier.

Free word-of-mouth publicity 

It is a known fact that we seek the help and recommendations of our friends and family, before making purchasing decisions. In social media scene, consumers request the help of their network of friends in such decision making processes. If you manage to accomplish the mission of emphasizing yourself as the expert in the industry through social media platforms’ discussion boards and forums, you can receive word-of-mouth publicity from your loyal followers and friends.

Reinforce your presence at every step 

Social media allows you to collaborate with a number of other channels like blog sites, video sharing sites and review sites. A social media user can just click a button to use them and the ease of use facilitates them with the tools to engage in extensive research about you. This reinforces your image in their minds and leaves your indelible imprint in various channels that improves your credibility and reputation manifold.

If you have suggestions/questions and advice to help other readers, please add them to the comments section.

How to Sell Advertising Space Online

online advertising image

Facebook Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

by ADMIN on DECEMBER 14, 2011

Small businesses need all the help they can get when it comes to discovering new marketing methods, and places to find new audiences for the products and services they provide. Many have alluded to the fact that Facebook provides an opportunity that is unlike anything ever seen when it comes to online marketing. The truth is – Facebook isn’t a place to simply make a few posts and say “I’ve tried it, but it didn’t work.” In order to be extremely successful using this free social networking tool will require a bit of time and patience.

Here you will discover 3 tips that will help you become successful in your marketing campaigns on Facebook, as well as understanding how to use them effectively.

1.)    Create a company page and begin communicating.

Creating a company page is not a difficult task on Facebook. You will be able to create a page that is company or business specific. Once your profile has been created, you will then need to consistently post unique original content that pertains to the services you provide.

This will allow visitors to learn more about what it is you do, and what you can do for them. However, simply creating a company profile will not be enough. You will need to update this profile with information on a regular basis. You will also need to engage your customers by responding to comments, and talk about things that interest others.

2.)    Use the free demographic tools available to target your market.

Targeting your audience can be done quite effectively using the tools that are provided for free. You can choose a specific age group, male or female, married or single, in college, career minded, or any other demographic combination to find that perfect audience and reach them through Facebook ad’s to like your page.

3.)    Make friends, share and answer concerns

Once you have setup a business page and found your audience, you will need to work on the message content you would like to convey. Once you have created your message, you can then begin engaging, sharing, and help others with concerns they may have. You will find that this is a very effective way to market your small business, and most important – it’s free.

Although these techniques do work, they will take time on the part of the business owner and employee. It will take time to create, develop, and implement. Once that part of the work is done, it’s a matter of gathering potential  followers and customers. Marketing on Facebook will not be difficult; it will simply take time and a sound strategy.

Using Facebook for Online Marketing

by ADMIN on APRIL 12, 2012

It’s quite obvious that social networking sites like Facebook are changing the way online marketing takes place in many different aspects. Quite frankly, a number of marketers refer to this phenomenon as a social media revolution when it comes to online marketing. With that being said, there are some important factors that will need to be understood in order to comprehend why using Facebook for online marketing is so powerful. Below you will discover some important information that will help you with this understanding, as well as how you can use this information to better position yourself with your online marketing efforts.

• Evaluating and Conducting Market Research Instantly

There has been no better tool ever developed that will allow you to evaluate and conduct market research almost instantaneously. If you aren’t sure about the popularity of a product or whether or not consumers will approve, you can conduct surveys, opinion polls, and simply ask questions to find out how people feel about a particular product or service. There isn’t any other platform available that provides this type of opportunity than by utilizing the services provided by Facebook.

• Establishing Credibility in Your Market Place

Establishing credibility has always been important and this can be done easier than ever by utilizing this social network platform. By associating and engaging others within your industry, this creates a sense of credibility around your business and the products and services you provide. This is extremely important to current, new, and future clients.

• Have Direct Access to Over 800 Million Users

The Facebook social network will allow you to have access to a vast number of users which will ultimately increase the visibility, exposure, and popularity of your business. Now, there are other platforms that will help you in this process as well; however, when used properly, Facebook will put your products and services in front of the audience you choose which will take your business to levels never before seen.

• Having the Ability to Generate vast Amounts of Traffic to Your Website

When a business or fan page has been set up properly on Facebook, you will ultimately be able to drive vast amounts of traffic to your Web presence on a consistent basis. This will improve your online marketing efforts because you will have relevant targeted traffic arriving at your website looking for the products and services you provide.

Now, there are a number of additional benefits you’ll receive when using Facebook for online marketing; however, the most important aspect will be to get started so you can begin to receive some of the benefits that will be provided by utilizing the information provided here in this post.