Outline of the Marketing Plan
China Resources Snow Breweries Ltd. (CR Snow) is Chinese beer brand with a peak position in the China. It is brewing company and headquarter is situated in Beijing, China. This is a joint venture of China Resources Enterprises and a multinational brand of UK SABMiller. This company is on the top position in this industry and they have sold 9.28 billion liters of beer in the year of 2010. Under this essay, CR Snow’s marketing plan will be discussed. Marketing strategies to promote the business for tits expansion and other approaches of marketing plan such as PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, marketing mix techniques will be included. Adequate approaches that will make a perfect marketing plan for the CR Snow will be adopted (Zhang & Zhang, 2010). Competitive analysis will also be implemented to analyze the strategies used by their competitors and for developing more effective and advanced techniques from competitors to overcome their approaches.
Marketing Research
This is a technique used by the marketing team to analyze the requirement of the consumers, market. This research is conducted through various techniques like customer feedback, surveys, etc. This helps the CR Snow to gather the required information in relevance to the demand of their beer amongst the public (Nunan & Di Domenico, 2013).
Under this approach, primary and secondary competitors are evaluated and their strategies used for promoting and advertising their products are also analyzed. Primary competitors play a crucial role in the development of the effective image in the market. As without competition in the market, single seller cannot determine its adequate value whereas competitors help the organizations to evaluate their importance. For CR Snow Ltd., Tsingtao Brewery Company Limited, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV and Beijing Enterprises Holdings Limited plays role of competitors (Weiss, 2010).
Under this approach, all the techniques through which CR Snow’s products will be promoted will be discussed. Through this approach, advanced techniques of advertisement through digital medium like internet, social media, etc. could also be used. Display promotion, free samples, discount offers, etc. are also included under marketing plan (Peter & Donnelly, 2011).
This is again an important aspect of the marketing plan because until and unless company is struggling in the financial resources, every plan for promotion, advertising, production, etc. will be failed. Every organization should be available with adequate financial resources to develop adequate marketing plan for the organization (Hope & Fraser, 2013).
This approach helps to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the organization and this is the important part before preparing marketing plan for the CR Snow Ltd. This analysis helps the organization to overcome from its weaknesses and converting crucial opportunities into its strengths (Li, et. al., 2014).
Strengths · CR Snow Ltd. is the big brand of selling beer in China. In 2010, more than 9.28 billion liters of beer were sold. · Under CR Snow Ltd. many other brands exists such as Snow is the primary brand of this organization and mostly this brand’s beer are produced by CR Snow. · Its other brands are Green Leaves, Blue Sword, Zero Clock, etc. · More than 2 lac people work with CR Snow Pvt. Ltd. · Primary competitor for all other beer producing companies (Su, et. al., 2010). |
Weaknesses · Margin of profit is very less due to heavy competition in beer industry. · Mainly revenues come from China only, expansion in the outside China is bit difficult. |
Opportunities · CR Snow has the opportunity of expansion in all the states of China and in neighbor countries also such as Hong Kong. · Producing qualitative and healthier beer from its competitors. · CR Snow could achieve growth in the whole Asia continent through adequate marketing strategies. |
Threats · As competition is increasing in beer industry hence, competitors are providing higher wages to increase the labor turnover ratio. · Huge and aggressive competition in the Chinese market is also a threat for CR Snow ltd. · Amendments by government of the China in relevance to the production, consumption of alcoholic drinks. |
Marketing mix is a technique which helps the organization to develop its strategies in relevance to the promotion and advertisement of the organizational products. This approach mainly involves a combination of 4Ps i.e. product, price, place for distribution and promotion (Kim & Hyun, 2011).
Product is the beer and producer is CR Snow Ltd. This company is a big manufacturer and distributor of beer that is an alcoholic drink amongst the whole China. CR Snow’s famous beer brand is Snow and 90% this brand’s beer is consumed within China. CR Snow has made some changes as per the market research done by the marketing team. They have made the beer as per the requirements of the consumers and the methods were used for its prevention are also updated (Peter & Donnelly, 2011).
Marketing Research
Price of the beer is the big factor of increasing its demand. CR Snow has a variety of brands under which various qualities beer is produced. There are a number of local brands also which serves very low quality beer at very cheap rates. This also affects the price strategy of CR Snow while setting per bottle price. To maintain the demand of their beer amongst the customers, adequate price strategy that includes a decent margin of profit on cost of the beer is added (Luan & Sudhir, 2010).
This describes the place through which beer of the CR Snow will be distributed amongst the customers. They have a large network of own stores as well as franchise stores through which beer of CR Snow could be purchased. This network involves the distributors, retailers, manufactures. All these parties require legal license of dealing in alcoholic products. Retailers who sell a variety of brands’ products in their store hence, they also sell a variety of beers in their stores. CR Snow offers number of discount, other offers for selling their beer only (Armelini & Villanueva, 2011).
This technique of marketing mix involves the promotion of the product produced by the organization. As per the current scenario, marketing team of the CR Snow Ltd. has promoted their beer brands across the China and in neighbor countries through digital media, print media and through sponsoring important events and by distributing free samples of the beer. These all activities should be recorded in the marketing plan so that all the activities could be performed under the budget allocated by the financial team of the CR Snow otherwise it could create negative impact over the other organizational activities.
While developing an effective marketing plan for CR Snow, adequate and appropriate measures should be used for evaluating the effects of political, economic, social and technical factors over the performance of the organization. It helps the organization to evaluate the effects of these factors over the particular industry and after evaluation; appropriate techniques could be adopted for success of marketing plan (Ho, 2014).
Political factors include amendments made by the political parties in policies in relevance to the alcoholic industry. These changes in the policies could create positive or negative impact over the organization’s performance. Hence, marketing plan should be flexible enough so that appropriate changes could be made easily as per the changes made by the government for the alcoholic industry. For instance, Government of the China could launch a new policy under which alcoholic drinks could be consumed after a particular age. It could reduce the number of consumers for the CR Snow and for this they should modify their marketing plan (Hail, et. al., 2010).
Economic factors include the economic growth, interest rates, inflation rate, etc. These could increase or decrease the price of the beer produced by the CR Snow Ltd. These features could also reduce the demand of the products in inflation situations where customer and buyer saves their money only to meet their future expenses and consumption of alcohol comes under the luxurious things.
Competition
These are the most important and affecting factors as health conditions, social responsibility, age distribution, etc. are included. CR Snow Ltd. needs to struggle from these factors as alcohol production and consumption is not an ethical activity as per social responsibilities. Over consumption of alcoholic drinks are harmful for the human being hence, social factors also gets affected though this. In this situation, demand for beer could be decreased (Rice, 2013).
These factors are the methods through which various innovative and unique measures could be adopted for the manufacturing of beer. Advanced techniques adopted will be helpful for CR Snow for the production of beer more conveniently (Nazari & Pihie, 2012).
Competitive Analysis helps the organization to evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing techniques adopted by the competitive organizations. CR Snow Ltd. uses this technique to determine their competitor’s marketing techniques so that advanced techniques could be developed or unique strategies could be adopted so that appropriate results could be extracted. This is also helpful for beating the competitors’ strategies and for gaining the more number of consumers. Through this analysis, CR Snow will determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of their competitors so that appropriate measures could be taken to overcome from those strengths of competitors and from weaknesses of own (Bienkowski, et. al., 2010).
Tsingtao Brewery Company Limited, Anheuser-Busch InBev NV and Beijing Enterprises Holdings Limited plays role of competitors are the primary competitors for CR Snow Ltd. in China and they play an important role in conducting fair trading practices across the country.
As CR Snow Ltd. is the strongest beer manufacturing and distributing company across the whole China. Hence they need to adopt some unique and advanced techniques through which they could stay ahead from their competitors. Competitors are making and amending their policies to beat the CR Snow’s beer.
This is again an important tool of marketing plan as this includes the formation of the policies regarding the segmentation of the particular market to select the group of the people for the product’s promotion. As this is the alcoholic product and for this people above age group of certain age would be the main target of the CR Snow. In China 18 years of age is considered as legal and after this age, people considered as adult and they can consume alcoholic drinks after this age (Hollensen, 2015).
So, CR Snow and their competitors’ main target would be this age group people as curiosity to taste new things and other types curiosity is founded in the younger age group of people in caparison to the older people. CR Snow Ltd. will target the people as per the segmentation market also; in this method audience is divided amongst the varieties of basis. Demographic, geographic, behavioral, etc. are some of the parts of the segmentation processes.
This is very crucial part of the marketing plan. Every business uses these techniques for the bringing awareness in the public regarding their products. CR Snow produces beer and this beer brand is very famous in China and it does not need any advertisement and promotional campaigns. Still for beating the competitors’ market and for gaining more number of consumers, marketing team of the CR Snow have adopted advertisement and promotional activities for promoting their products amongst the markets of China (Shimp & Andrews, 2012).
Marketing Plan Strategies
For promoting the Snow brand’s beer, marketing manager has adopted adequate mediums of advertisement. Generally advertisement and promotion mediums are of two types, one is print medium and the other one is electronic medium/digital medium, etc. CR Snow uses both these mediums as people of China still use both mediums.
Print medium of advertisement includes newspaper advertisement, magazines, pamphlets, board hoardings, etc. These techniques of promotion are included in traditional approaches and marketing team of the CR Snow limited is planning for promotion of the beer products hence, these print mediums cannot be used at bigger level. Beer promotion could be done through board hoarding in front of the wine shops, restaurants, etc. Display promotion could also be used for the advertisement of the beer.
Digital medium of the promotion includes internet, social media, radio, etc. This medium of advertisement is bit cheaper than the print medium and it also covers the large part of the area for promoting the products and services of the products.
This is a technique used for the reviewing the strategies and approaches used for building the marketing plan. In marketing plan of CR Snow Ltd. various strategies like marketing mix, promotional campaigns, different promotional methods, PEST analysis, etc. are used as per the marketing conditions of the China. So for achieving adequate results from the policies and rules applied in the new marketing plan, evaluations of those strategies are necessary to record any kind of glitch and error. This activity is performed for the betterment of the organization and this also helps the organization to gain better results from application of marketing strategies (Bryman & Bell, 2015).
Marketing strategies used for the promotion of the beer of CR Snow Ltd. are developed through adequate styles so that these could be helpful in the changing environment of the market. Marketing conditions are subjective in nature and certain conditions are trends of the market, customer behavior, taste and preferences, etc.
For reviewing the marketing strategies adequate analysis should be used and it also helps to evaluate the adequate marketing position of the organization amongst its competitors and in the industry as well.
Conclusion
From the above essay, it could be concluded that CR Snow Ltd. is the big brand in the China and this is a joint venture from SABMiller Ltd. which is a UK based company. They have set up their very good image in the customer’s mind though delivering them good quality beer. They have set up their rules and regulation by following and fulfilling all the requirements of the government’s policies. Under this essay, effective marketing plan of the CR Snow is being builds up for the betterment of the organization and this will also beat the competitors’ strategies. Marketing mix techniques used by the CR Snow Ltd. are discussed and these are valuable for making an effective marketing plan for the organization. CR Snow Ltd. has adopted to implement the PEST analysis, competitive analysis, SWOT analysis for reviewing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the organization. After development of an effective marketing plan, marketing team also adopted some technique to review the plan to record any error and glitch occurs (Noonan & Di Domenico, 2013).
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