Marketing mix strategies for product-market combinations and promotion approaches

Marketing Mix

The target market/product combinations that I have selected are selling non-lethal security to black women aged 18-30 and selling vacations to gun owners. Black women aged 18-30 will respond best to a viral strategy. It is important to realize that this market is highly sociable, and word of mouth for a product can spread very quickly. This target audience has specific tastes with respect to the media it consumes, and that should guide the promotions strategy. However, the message should not be overly focused on the product attributes. There should be a specific lifestyle component to the promotions, for example setting an ad in a hair salon, but focused on a conversation where a group of young black women discuss how safe they feel with the product in their purse. The product should fit in as part of the lifestyle for a young black woman. Additionally, there should be some sort of viral component to the promotional program so as to encourage word of mouth promotion among peers. Encouraging word of mouth is expected to be especially effective with this demographic.

Gun owners, being that there are millions of them, fit a mix of demographics, and a vacation need not to be built around guns specifically. Presumably the vacation has the same demographic as gun ownership, so gun publications, NRA meetings, gun shops, hunting shops and the like would be a good way to reach this target audience. Danaher (1996) notes that indirect marketing can be an effective way to reach one's target market, especially if that target market is not looking for your service specifically. With vacations, people seek out vacation information from a lot of different sources, but have more concentrated media with respect to their gun information, for example. If there is significant crossover between the two target markets, it can be better to simply focus on the one that is easier to reach. The promotion plan would otherwise be unchanged -- there need not be a specific gun focus on the ads, but the choice of media will be dictated by the principles of indirect marketing.

For the non-lethal security device, I believe that penetration pricing would be the best strategy (NetMBA, 2010). In this case, there is a new product that consumers do not necessarily need. In order to convince consumers to make the purchase, the pricing must be aggressive. This implies penetration pricing, because that will help the product to gain initial market share. Remember that the promotion program calls for emphasis on word-of-mouth marketing. The more early adopters the product can have, the more effective a word-of-mouth or viral campaign will be.