Overview
We provide a service many people tend to overlook, dry cleaning. Now, when you hear dry cleaning you might be inclined to automatically think about your usual drop off Monday and pick up Wednesday deal; but what makes us unique is that we plan to offer something much more personalized, and much more luxurious. What is the one thing everyone wishes they had more of? Time. If you add up the time that it takes you to sit in traffic, drive to the dry cleaning spot and drop off your clothes, I bet you could think of at least five things you would rather be doing.
Our service would be easy to access; you have the option of either scheduling on our website or using our App; either way, we can guarantee that your order will be treated in the urgent manner that you deserve.
Our main goal is to help business people and their affluent cohorts who do not have enough time to do their laundry. We will have different deals and membership levels. We will also provide what is called “membership” which will include a varying number of full service 24-hour door-to-door calls and a lesser number of last-minute “red carpet services” that will allow the client their items to be laundered and dry cleaned in as little as 2 hours.
The red carpet service allows our customers to call at any time day or night and have their clothes ready for their big meeting or event. In addition, we will be providing a free shoeshine service for “red carpet service” visits. We plan to offer group memberships to our most prestigious local corporate offices at a special group rate in order to extend our services to their powerful and affluent employees. Each employee would receive one free delivery service when they are boarded to the company. This will allow us to gain access to every employee’s personal data through our customer relationship management software, and have it filed into our market research database.
Mission Statement
Overnight Star Service has the mission to obtain leadership in our market of residential delivery dry cleaning and personal laundry services. Our excellence in service is based on innovative ideas that contribute with personalized solutions for our clients, offering them the safety of having, in that opportune moment, reliable service, and high quality. The absolute satisfaction of our service represents our main purpose, a difference that distinguishes us significantly from the competition, making this a virtue, we offer only the best presentation to our customers. For such purposes, we have an efficient team of highly skilled and fully motivated customer concierge specialists to provide a first-class service.
Segmenting and Targeting Market
The market of Overnight Star Services in the Tampa Bay area is present but certainly not saturated. The only approaches to laundry services available consist of your typical self-service or drop-offs with a drive-through. We are trying to find a way to better cater to the latter; this group is composed of people who use the traditional drop-off service but would tremendously benefit from something more personalized and convenient. According to our studies, our target market will be composed of a social group that maintains the following characteristics:
Age
The average age of our customers should fluctuate between 26 and 65 years. This makes it possible to include young professionals who are just perching atop their respective fields as well as more experienced professionals who know the importance of appearance, making a good impression, and efficient time management in the business world.
Gender
The service we offer is targeted towards executives, regardless of gender, who value their time at a higher rate than the premium required for membership.
Income
Overnight Star Service focuses our service specifically on upper-middle class and affluent members of the business, social, and non-profit community organizations.
Social Class
Our goals for Overnight Star Service will channel a strong corporate affinity. Our customers are individuals who have a strong sense of pride in their white-collar status. Upper Middle class to upper-class clientele.
Lifestyle
The profile of our customers can be defined as young professionals or married power couples who know that good service often comes at a greater cost. Our clientele works hard, but plays harder, and won’t settle for anything less than the creme de la creme. We are targeting people who are so busy with work, that they savor and indulge in the little free time they have.
Positioning
The Service Mix
Place (Distribution) Strategy
Overnight Star Service will have an extremely focused distribution channel. We are a web and app-only based system. You must request our service through a smartphone application or not at all. We plan on launching our service directly. We want to kick-off marketing exclusively through offices. Ideally, what this will look like is having our business cards in breakrooms with a scannable QR code to download the app and launch your first service free. The user will immediately be prompted to input their personal pick-up information (location) and payment information (credit or debit card) into our CRM. Immediately following requests of a “rapid red carpet” service the app will launch a countdown clock to the time specified by the user.
Promotion Strategy
The only promotional items we will be using are our business cards, hangers, and garment bags. These items will be extremely high end. We would like to have all black felt finish hangers with gold accents. Our company logo will be discreetly printed on the center of the hanger and we will have sleek black polyester garment bags with gold buttons on the bottom. The hangers will be complimentary; the garment bags will have a discount incentive on membership costs if returned.
Price Strategy
Our pricing strategy will be based on a membership and rewards plan. Ideally, we would like to create a service that will charge monthly dues, much like a country club, or gym membership.
Resources
To accomplish our goals we will need a substantial start-up investment. We want our employees to be trained and rehearsed to the highest standard of customer service, hospitality, and craftsmanship. Our service will be executed via multiple mobile full-service vans, though the customer will never see these discrete sleek and black Mercedes sprinters, they will comprise the aspect of the entire operation of our business. The mobility of our salon sprinters will allow us to achieve our deadlines and then some.
Our staff will be subservient and conspicuous, much like the demeanor of a member of the presidential secret service member or bodyguard. They will keep the volume of their voice and gestures to the minimum. We want to create an all-encompassing experience of mystery and exclusivity.
This campaign is going to revolve heavily around member referrals and subtle product placement among the very elite, powerful, and revered members of society. We will approach a handful of very key centers of influence in the community and offer them three months of unlimited free service. This group will be comprised of select CEOs, socialites, and local celebrities known for their exquisite taste and enviable lifestyle.
Actions & Delivery
Our customers would have to request our service through our App, and for this, they have two options. The first one is “Full Service,” and the second option is “Red Carpet Service”. After receiving our customers’ request we will have our Black Mercedes Sprinters go to our customer’s locations to pick up their clothes; the cleaning process takes place inside the vans. After that, we will have our customers’ clothes waiting for them on our black hangers and protected by our garment bags.
Both the hangers and the bags are going to be very high in quality. The hangers will be complimentary; the garment bags will have a discount incentive on membership costs if returned. The Red Carpet Service allows our customers to call at any time during the day and have their clothes ready for their special occasion or meeting. Shoe Shine Service would be provided for those who requested the “Red Carpet Service”.
Supply Chain
Our supply chain will revolve around servicing and staffing the Mercedes Sprinters we will launch from our three main warehouse hubs. We plan to have one warehouse in the Tampa/Miami area, one in the New York City/Metropolitan Area, and one in the Los Angeles/Hollywood area. These warehouses will also serve as tech headquarters where our specialists will oversee orders and membership requests coming into the app, human resource and staffing operations will take place, marketing offices will be established, and where our five-star customer concierge training and development operations will take place.
Our supply chain planning is based on the flow of information. Knowing our needs exactly allows us to establish an optimal level of supplies. This will prevent a surplus or deficit in supplies used in our service that could affect our costs and/or the normal flow of our operations.
Overnight Star Service information systems will control the mobile service units to determine the availability of supplies needed to operate with autonomy for 24 hours. After this period, the unit will return to our warehouse to receive maintenance and supply the Mercedes Sprinter with the necessary supplies. Because part of our company is selling our customers a time-sensitive service, we will need to strategically station our loaded on-call Sprinters over our service area equally in relation to each other to ensure expedited service in the situation of a “red carpet service request”.
We will use advanced GPS information technology systems to be able to direct our sprinters where they need to be to ensure we always have an on-call unit no more than 45 minutes away from any given location in our service areas. The system will need to be highly collaborative in order to facilitate our cars being called on and off active duty.
Likewise, Overnight Star Service information systems will constantly report to our office the quantities of supplies needed to maintain an optimal stock in our warehouse. This information will help our office to project the number of supplies to be requested by our providers. Additionally, our providers will be permanently connected with our information system to meet our requirements at the established times. One way to minimize our operating costs is to timely sign contracts with our supplies or services providers, which will allow us to obtain the best conditions in the negotiations, similar to a just-in-time inventory management system.
Marketing Channel
Since we are offering a service and not a material good we seek to use intermediaries in the form of promotions. The companies that we initially partner up with in order to collect data and to promote our service will be our intermediaries. We will also be using non-traditional intermediaries approaches like social media in order to get our customer’s attention. This will be discussed more extensively in the promotional mix section.
Star Overnight Service will have a direct sales channel. This means contact with our customers without intermediaries. Interacting with our customers will allow the company to receive direct information about the satisfaction and needs relating to our service. Any modifications to the strategies developed to improve the service and/or costs will be based on this information. Star Overnight Service will interact with customers via phone, email, and social media in order to get our customer’s attention.
Distribution Intensity
Our level of distribution intensity will be that of selective distribution. Seeing as we will be starting out in the Tampa Bay area with plans to expand to major cities like New York, Miami, and L.A, our service will be available exclusively in these areas.
Promotional Mix
Advertising
Since we will have access to every employee’s personal data through our customer relationship management software, as we mentioned in the overview, we will be sending e-mails to employees telling them about our service and explaining to them how they can benefit from our service.
We will also put our advertisements on social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The main objective of this digital marketing plan is to attract the youthful customers’ market through the company’s website and a Twitter fun page in order to increase customer traffic in its stores. The objective aims at packaging the laundry services as a favorite of the customers who frequent social media and actually share a common communication culture. Apparently, this segment forms the largest bracket of those who are targeted by the advertisement plan. The use of social media to attract this market segment is achievable since the target market frequents social media as a site for interaction and shopping for similar services.
Advertising will be involved in increasing the visibility of the company’s website through search engine optimization. Search engine optimization for the Overnight Star Service website will be achieved by installing plugins that possess extra features such as page navigation, thumbnail, and customized page numbers. Specifically, this proposed system in Google will consist of a multi-tab page that will serve different areas and services to online customers.
The main categories may be laundry ordering menu, e-newspaper/magazines and brochures related to common services, shopping (duty-free) for customized laundry options, and a guide on cost for each type of service at the Overnight Star Service. Using tools that allow us to track who visited our website, we will use visitor’s digital footprint information to better aim our advertisements to potential leads who might actually be interested in our service. This advertising method will allow us to better communicate with our target market at a lower cost per contact.
Consumer Sales Promotion
As we stated in the advertising plan, we seek to use different methods of online communication such as email and social media in order to promote our product. Another part of our plan regarding consumer sales promotions is the inclusion of a free first-time trial deal, in which new customers only get to try any of our services worth up to $30 for free, in the hopes that this incentive will create a new consumer base that will eventually grow into a mutually beneficial relationship.
In the Overnight Star Service’s promotional strategy, there will be coupons for customers who pay for certain services, and everyone is a winner. There will be the component of the campaign for the discount promotion is web and store for the proposed service coupon. To promote the coupon, the Overnight Star Service will deploy many advertisement mechanisms like word of mouth, publicizing through leaflets, online advertisement through its website, the announcement of the promotional offer, promotion by the use of local media, social media, and billboards at the entrance of the store. The Overnight Star Service will operate on the business pillars such as persuasive merchandise, balanced business channels, and establishment of assessment in service delivery through the promotional coupons. These strategies are aimed at ensuring continuous expansion and customer satisfaction.
Public Relations
As part of our public relations strategy, we would like to implement a strong presence on social media sharing techniques. Our primary goal will be to target centers of influence on Instagram. Customers with 4,000 followers or more, who are already members of our elite service, will receive one additional free “red carpet service” every time they receive over 500 likes on a photo tagged with #OSSredcarpet.
In addition to our most affluent customers, we will also offer our incentive membership services to notable Hollywood stylists who exclusively service celebrity clientele. We will channel their connections in an attempt to position them as intermediaries to sell memberships to their high profile celebrity clientele. If we are able to penetrate the Celebrity market, we will secure our position as a coveted and prestigious service indicative of reputable social status, and effectively establish dominance in a market that will create exponentially positive public opinion.
The business will employ the laggard activism strategy to not only capture the market but also leapfrog any dominant competitor. The store will operate on the Customer-to-Customer (C2C) platform and Business-to-Business (B2B) platform. The Overnight Star Service’s business platform will be modified through the introduction of services such as premium customer experience, compact support from the community, and low charges for a loyal customer. For instance, the Customer-to-Customer platform will ensure customer loyalty and market expansion.
In order to promote good public relations, the Overnight Star Service will contact management since it provides a decision support system to select the best market access on suitability, distribution structure, and integration of contact channels among the customers. The contact management system in the Overnight Star Service will take the form of Debit card services, online support, and a 24-hour call center to connect to the customers. This system will be constantly upgraded through value–added services. Keeping these channels restricted will help the Overnight Star Service to boost customer confidence in keeping their particulars safe.
We would also like to pursue a partnership with the Make a Wish foundation to offer the services of our most exceptional concierges to its recipients. #OSSfairygodmother will be the tag we will use to bring awareness to the cause, and we will be swooping in to provide total client transformations hours before their big “wish” day.
Personal selling
In order to sell the laundry services to clients, the Overnight Star Service will use the product approach, beneficial approach, and the referral approach through a team of salespersons. By combining these three approaches, the Overnight Star Service’s sales executives will use the product approach by displaying the services to potential clients after which they will employ the beneficial approach by describing the benefits such as time-saving, efficiency, and high-end approach. In order to restore the confidence of potential clients, the sales support team will use a referral approach by mentioning companies and individuals that have recently used the services of the Overnight Star Service business.