Introduction
The ESPRIT is a well know brand name company in the worldwide, and it has controlled retail space of over 450,000 square meters in more than 43 countries spanning 5 continents. It operates approximately 560 directly managed retail stores and has over 7,000 wholesale outlets comprising free-standing stores, department store shop-in-shops and “doors” in boutiques. Esprit will introduces its clothing products in India.
Marketing Strategic Analysis
Environment Analysis
To increase the quality of the strategic decision-making of going to India, it is necessary to consider the external environment (external analysis) and internal environment (internal analysis) prior to making irrevocable decisions. This section describes the environmental tools that were used for the subsequent analysis in the strategic choice element of the investigation.
SWOT Matrix
The SWOT Matrix is a tool that analyses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that organisations face. The strengths and weaknesses relate to internal aspects of the organisation and the opportunities and threats are factors that exist within the external environment in which the organisation operates.
Strengths
One of the biggest assets that Esprit has is the strength from a global dispersion; this gives Esprit their other strengths, which lie in their global and local availability and convenience; the fact that they have an outlet in most countries.
Weaknesses
Esprit’s overhead is 13% higher in terms of percentage of revenues than Boss and 17% higher than Bond’s. This increased overhead is not a result of an excessive advertising budget, since only 6% of Esprit sales goes toward advertising and 10% of Bond’s sales goes to marketing in India.
Opportunities
One thing that Esprit has an abundance of is opportunities, because of their strengths and weaknesses, Esprit have a variety of venues that they could go into and improve themselves.
Threats
- Exchange rates are a big threat.
- The major increase in substitute products as well as price wars all account for Esprit to vary of the changes that are occurring in the market and at the same be somehow over come the difficulties that they have to face.
Limitations to the SWOT Matrix
- It Does not account for uncertainty of future.
- Does not give holistic model of the organisation.
- Not aimed at option evaluation or selection.
- May cause problems if not approached honestly – i.e. over-perceiving strengths in order to hide weaknesses.
Segmentation
In order for Esprit to be successful in India, it is important to segment the market using appropriate criteria in order to target precise segments like age, gender, income effectively.
Targeting
Esprit should target customers aged 25-35yrs in India which can be divided into two existing customers and new customers. Existing consumers are those who are aware of the brand. Marketers believe it is much easier to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones, in order to maximise profitability. The most important customers to Esprit are those who are loyal and who own an Esprit Charge-card. By referring to their customer database, Esprit will be able to identify which of theses customers fall into their target segment. Once this has been identified, Esprit in Australia must use effective preservation strategy like offering gifts and discounts.
Positioning
Esprit aim is to satisfy the broad majority of people with quality products at attractive prices by being innovative. Esprit spent only 0.3% of its revenue on media advertising, compared with 3%-4% for most specialty retailers.
Marketing Mix
Esprit‘s well-designed marketing mix is in consistency with its “medium quality fashion clothing at affordable price” positioning and its selling concept.
Product
- Its brand ESPRIT has been a leading international lifestyle fashion brand name applied to an extensive range of women’s, men’s and children’s apparel, footwear and accessories.
- Licensed products bearing the ESPRIT name ranges from timewear, eyewear, jewel and fragrance, to bedding and other home products.
- In addition, the Group owns the “RED EARTH” brand name and distributes its cosmetics, skin and body care products.
Price
Customers recognize Esprit as providing good quality clothing at reasonable prices; therefore, the company should maintain flexible pricing strategy to be able to compete with the competitors in the market.
Promotion
The key message associated Esprit line is classy and flexible. The company’s promotional plan is diverse and include a range of Websites, TV, Newspaper, it is be a champion marketing plan that include all the communications channels and to ensure using the existing Esprit’s database to target the target customers as well as loyal Esprit shoppers.
Multi-Channel Distribution Strategy
ESPRIT offers different kinds of the products under the same brand name. Such as women’s, men’s and children’s apparel, and timewear, footwear, eyewear, jewel, fragrance and so on. Also, ESPRIT Group owns the “RED EARTH” brand name and distributes its cosmetics, skin and body care products.
Changes in Marketing Strategies
Market Space’s Components
Esprit.com/in will create an effectively electronic marketplace, also called market space, to the company. It is part of a process that will facilitate us to continue given that a service to our customers no matter how or when they want to shop. This market space includes numerous main components as follow.
Customer
The website is obtainable to the millions of customers who visit the stores each week and to regular Web users. Because of the vast range of delivering services, customers in Australia and some other countries can buy goods from the website.
Sellers
Customers can buy the goods directly from the website, and get the goods by delivery. There is a special free store delivery for the home customers. Customers can select delivery to ‘Esprit Store’ in the Shopping Basket in website and collect the order from the nominated store.
Product
It offers a huge array of online shopping for more than 20,000 products designed per year for 12 product lines for women, men and kids and additionally a broad diversity of license products for every part of life. Lots of items are greatly discounted.
Intermediary
Although Esprit is the ‘click-and mortar’ retailer, it also use some other website as the intermediaries to found more customers. For example, B*shop (European), E*shop (German), and Vendor portal are some of its intermediaries that can connect to the Esprit website after customers’ comparison. Furthermore, all the Esprit retailers are also the e-commerce’s intermediaries.
Business Partner
The company encourages other website to consider the partnership with Esprit.com/in to expand its business. For example, the Esprit.com/in has launched a new and improved with renowned companies.
ESPRIT e*club Card
ESPRIT will provide the ESPRIT e*club card and it would be very different strategy they process than other brand names companies. For example, if the customers buy over CAD $200. And the ESPRIT e*club card would provided several functions to the customers. For other companies, such as Gap and Roots, they would not be same as EXPRIT. They don’t have any discount card, or reward card as like as ESPRIT. However, since there are so many competitors in the market place. So, ESPRIT gives their customer bigger benefits, which is that their customer can apply the ESPRIT e*club card for free. And the customer can pick the application form in the every retail stores or apply on the website. And it will be more convenience to their customers.
Working of ESPRIT E*Card
For every purchase with ESPRIT e*club card in one of their stores, they will credit customers account with e*points. And when customers have accumulated 1,500 e*points, then they will receive a coupon for e*points by mail. As a member of the e*club, the customer will enjoy many more benefits, such as free call center service, offers from cooperation partners, and personal access to your account balance. Also, ESPRIT e*club card is completely free and without obligations. And the customer’s personal data is only used for internal purposes.
Design of Outlets
Esprit designs its stores with colorful theme and with big fashion pictures on the windows, and also they classified their clothes or accessories very clear. So, their customers can feel young and fashion atmosphere when they walk into the stores. In addition, they design their in side of the store as bright as possible. They also use red background with white color letters to impress their customers.
Compare to Mexx or Banana Republic, there retail stores’ design looks like more mature. And their target market is trend to office style and more formal. So, it will not attract many youth customer to interest in or want to purchase it. Because of the image of the store structure will make them to feel the price more expensive than ESPRIT.
Product Life Cycle Stage With Respect To Promotion
- Introduction Stage.
- Growth Stage.
- Maturity Stage.
- Declination.
References
Chaney Joseph, (2007), Fashion chain Esprit’s H2 profit up 50 pct. Web.
Clothing Retailing in Australia – Industry Report, 2007, 56 pages. Web.
“Madison HGCD to aid fashion giant, Esprit, in return to NY – Retail – Brief Article”. Real Estate Weekly. 2003. FindArticles. Web.