Executive Summary
Asos Company trades in clothing and markets its products online. This year, the Company is planning for an advertising campaign through TV channels and weekly magazines.
The budgeted amount for the campaign is $500,000 and the advertisement will start from the month of July. The TV advertisement will appear three times during the sport news and cost $60,000. The campaign will also appear in a weekly magazine in an A4 spread and cost $42,000 (Pozzi 2012).
The objective of the campaign is to increase the sales by the end of July by 5%. The objective is based on the growth of online sales in Australia, which have increased to 61% from 59% during the last financial year. Going by the strategies in place, by the end of July sales are expected to increase by 5%. The online advertisement is aiming at evoking interests from a wide range of customers especially women (Marquis & Udo 2001).
Background of ASOS Company
Two people namely Nick and Quentin founded ASOS in June 2000 in the United Kingdom. The acronym refers to “as seen on screen”. The company started as a small business that specialized on online sales of products that were associated with celebrities. ASOS has about 1000 employees and approximately 50,000 brands on fashion.
Within one year after the Company was created, it joined London Stock Exchange and continued growing in size. ASOS has developed strategies to attract attention from women from the year 2005 by introducing a beauty line and men’s line in the year 2007. Today, the company is the leading retailer in the United Kingdom (Brynjolfsson & Smith 2001).
Introduction
ASOS Company is targeting to evoke interests from 16.6 million unique customers on monthly basis from different parts of the world where the targeted customers are aged 18 years and above. Last year alone, the number of online users registered with ASOS Company reached 8.7 million while those who had already shopped from the Company reached 4.7 million from 160 states (Marquis & Udo 2001).
ASOS Company specializes in Unisex clothes and brands in fashion but the current strategies also aim at evoking the interest of older women by meeting their special needs. ASOS’s campaign is unique in that no other Company has explored the target market of older women. The older women being targeted by the company are aged between 35 and 50 years (Pozzi 2012).
Reasons for targeting women aged between 30 to 50 years
There are many reasons why the company should target women between the age of 30 and 50 years (Brynjolfsson & Smith 2001). Women at this age are always occupied with their families either attending to their kids at home or taking them to school as well as outings on weekends and holidays. They do such activities every time they are free from work.
Such women therefore require to dress in outfits that give them confidence as their activities involve interacting with people of their class (Marquis & Udo 2001). On the other hand, women approaching the age of 50 years become less busy with most of their children being through with schooling thus reducing the number of commitments.
At this time, women like spending their extra time in going out and socializing with friends. It is therefore paramount for them to improve their appearance. ASOS Company wishes to help such women style their appearance at a price they can afford (Brynjolfsson & Smith 2001).
Women aged 30 and 50 years experience change in fashion through their peers and like adjusting their wardrobes to match the new social group. Therefore, women aged between 30 and 50 years like being confident and careful when choosing their attires.
ASOS will ensure that the campaign includes seeking the input of women at the specified age and pays attention to their comments about what they enjoy wearing as well as observing the fashions being worn by similar women in different parts of the world (Marquis & Udo 2001).
More focus will be on creating awareness for the prospective women customers at this age than provoking their behaviour towards the products because this strategy follows the hierarchy model.
According to the model, the number of those who are interested with awareness and knowledge is always high but as the pyramid goes up the number of those who can change their behaviour towards a particular brand decreases (Marquis & Udo 2001).
The women who may be unaware of the products require awareness by recognizing the products in the adverts using repetitive messages bearing the name of the products offered by the company. This will be difficult because some women may have their attention captured but fail to note the brand offered by the company (Whit 1998).
ASOS will concentrate on building the knowledge base of the women targeted because they may be aware of the products but lack more information them.
The advertisement will target women to make them comprehend the names on the different brands of clothes sold by the company as well as what the names of the brands represent. ASOS will focus on ways to convince customers how its brands are different from those of its competitors as well as identifying the specific appeals based on their benefits to the women (Pozzi 2012).
The Company will build the preference for the women customers by promoting the quality of the clothes and other features such as high performance and value because the women may like the brands but not prefer them to products from the competitors.
ASOS will measure the success of the campaign by checking the preference of women before and after the advertisements. The Company will also build on convincing the targeted women because making them prefer its brands to others may not necessarily mean they will be convinced to buy (Marquis & Udo 2001).
The final step in the campaign will be targeting women to purchase the products because they may be convinced to make the purchase but fail to get around to actual purchasing. The customers may continue waiting for more details about the brand or decide to make the purchases later (Pozzi 2012).
The campaign will ensure the targeted women take the final step by reducing the price of the clothes and introducing premiums for the products.
The targeted customers will also be allowed to try out the products of their choice by searching out for more details about the brands. Thus, the campaign by ASOS Company will be systematic. The stages will start with building awareness and end with the purchasing of the brands (Brynjolfsson & Smith 2001).
References
Brynjolfsson, E & Smith, M 2001, ‘Consumer decision-making at an internet shopbot: brand still matters’, Journal of Industrial Economics, vol. 49, pp. 541-558.
Marquis, G & Udo, J 2001, ‘Factors affecting e-commerce web site effectiveness’, Journal of Computer Information Systems, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 10-17.
Pozzi, A 2012, ‘Shopping cost and brand exploration in online grocery’, American Economic Journal Microeconomics, vol. 4, pp. 96-120.
Whit, A 1998, ‘At far too many sites ‘buyer be lost’ applies’, Internet World, vol. 98, no. 6, pp. 23-26.