Wal Foods
Wal Foods is a food store that will strive to offer a wide array of organic food and health products to the growing market of wellness consumers in New York City. It also plans to venture into opening a cafe, and that will eventually become a franchise. Since there is a large market for healthy foods, the success of this company has relied on the quality and standards of the food being sold in the store. The main goals and objectives of Wal Foods are as follows:
- To provide affordable and high-quality organic food to the wellness consumers in New York City
- To constantly guide and inform wellness consumers about the health products we offer;
- To continuously strive to make our service fast, accommodating and excellent towards all our wellness consumers.
The mission statement of Wal Foods is to provide food that is healthy to our customers and be concerned about their well being. This possible through the provision of the best natural and organic foods while taking into consideration the food safety and quality of our products.
Since Wal Foods concentrates on offering organic food products in the store and focuses on offering fresh and organic fruits and vegetables, among the products offered by the company are exotic organic tropical fruits like organic mangoes, papaws, bananas and pineapples. We also sell health supplements like virgin coconut oil, bitter gourd capsules and other unique health items that are not found in ordinary health shops.
Wal Foods has potential partners in shopping malls by being their suppliers of organic tropical fruits. Since lots of people visit malls, this is a great way of advertising our product offerings. Wal Foods has 100 employees: a manager, accountants, cashiers, store helpers, drivers, marketers and messengers. The Wal Foods employees have an aptitude for the required tasks, dedication to the assigned job and most of all, give all our customers and shareholders service excellence with a smile.
Marketing mix
In marketing management, the main aim is to accomplish business and marketing policy and to do this, a good marketer should take into consideration planning, organizing, directing and coordination in order to come up with a good marketing plan and once the marketing plan has been drafted, the marketer should coordinate the important elements of marketing that are drafted in order to achieve results.
Coordination is very vital in marketing because, in order for marketers to execute their tasks well and management duties in general, they need to coordinate various activities to come up with the achievement of both the primary and core objectives of the firm. Just like marketers do coordination, they need to integrate the interests of the various players in the organization as a whole, both the owners and (shareholders) and employees( management).
This is not the only part that involves coordination. Coordination also involves the integration of marketing activities and the general marketing environment. These are the four key instruments of marketing. They are known as the marketing mix elements. Most people know them as the 4 p’s of marketing. When these four elements of the marketing mix are: price, product, place and promotion. These variables are also called the controllable variables or the 4 p’s of marketing.
They are the activities or decisions areas which a marketer can manipulate (co-ordinate) in order to achieve marketing objectives. Take, for instance, price; the marketer can, for example, price a product highly or lowly in order to achieve marketing objectives. Coordinating variables is done at the point where marketers make marketing programs.
The marketing mix elements represent the total need satisfying marketing offering of marketing management, and each marketing mix element contains sub-elements that also need to be properly planned and co-coordinated well. This is the reason why co-ordination is very important, just like it is when dealing with marketing planning as a whole where there must be coordination with the different types of marketing environment (external or internal) and also coordination between the different marketing decision areas; there must be coordination between product elements, price elements, promotion and distribution (place) elements in order to achieve marketing objectives.
A good marketing mix is one where there is a good distribution of product, price, place and promotion with respect to good marketing communication, and it must be known that good communication of policies and strategies of the marketing mix is a reason for effective coordination. There are several methods of coordination of the marketing mix elements. First, we have the wind-clay camp method where the marketer does coordination by first evaluates the product, the target market and then look at the weak and strong points of the product in the target market.
The marketer then will obtain accurate information about the product in regard to the sales of the product, profitability and the market share of the product. After this, he will project the future sales of the product in the target market. He then will do additional diagnosis analysis for the development of the product and marketing mix. Lastly, he will look at a possible action in cases of competition and changes in the marketing environment.
The other method of coordinating marketing mix elements is by the use of the simulation method, where a numerical (number) is given to represent the dynamic process over time. The reasons are the values of the variables, which define the position of the process at the end of a specific time interval. This is done so until the total desired period is represented.
The other method is the Test marketing method, and this method involves a case where the choice between alternative marketing mix elements is hard because of a new marketing offering, or the marketing managers are not experienced or get the nature of reaction that a marketing mix will generate. The objectives of test marketing are to reduce the risk of changing or developing a new marketing mix before the marketer can use it successfully.
We also have other arithmetical methods of coordination that are, for example, the Bayesian decision method. These are made choices from alternative marketing mixes. However, here the managers have no idea how each variable environmental acts ( react) and at what probability. They must also have one or more objectives or measure on where they will base their comparison. In this method, a marketing manager should choose the marketing mix that maximizes the expected value or result.
The above methods of coordination should be used as the basis of product, price, place and promotion. This is done in the following way. To start with the product, a marketing manager must first know well his product, product features and the type of the product. We have different classifications of products, and this range from physical products to intangible and services.
He should know the product line, product mix and product item still under product. A good marketer should understand product development issues and why the company needs to do new product developments, and if they come up with a new product, how the consumer will be led to adopt the product and the adoption process. He should also be aware of the product innovation-decision process. He should then coordinate this with other marketing elements along the product life cycle of the introduction stage, maturing stage and decline stage. He should know which marketing strategies are vital at which stage of the product life cycle.
Price decisions should be taken into account for effective coordination of the marketing mix. The marketer should review the major dimensions of price, the importance of price, price theories, how to set price and types of pricing methods, factors that determine the price of commodities, pricing policies and controls in the market.
After making price decisions, the marketer should now consider the place, and in this case, place means types of channels of distribution that companies can use to ensure that their products reach consumers or customers at the market place. There are long channels of distribution that have many middlemen and long channels with few middlemen. The marketer should also decide on the types of intermediaries to use in distribution of his products because middlemen are used if they perform certain fractions better that producers and final consumers and they assist in some functions such as contacts with consumers, physical distribution, demand simulation and they also give information about consumers to the company because they deal directly with the consumers.
Promotion decisions should also be coordinated with other elements of the marketing mix and promotion decisions include decisions on determination of promotion mix and the promotion mix includes advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and general idea is to understand how they relate with the general principles of communication and promotion process. The marketer should also try to understand determinants of promotion mix.
The understanding and coordination of the four factors is the basis of good marketing management. These are the elements suppose to aid managers to make marketing decisions to coordinate these elements, marketers must take consideration three fundamental elements like coordination of the variables with external marketing environment, between the various decisions making areas i.e. marketing field in general. Although there is no one procedure for coordinating to be followed, it is advisable to plan and execute coordination well in order to get good results.
In Wal foods we have positioned ourselves by creating a niche in offering a wider array of organic foods in New York City. Whereas, most food stores offers organic tomatoes, lettuce and other common vegetables. We have gone a mile higher by offering organic tropical fruits to New Yorkers. In achieving this, we organized Fair Trade farmers in the Caribbean region who are our partners in supplying organic tropical fruits to our wellness consumers. Wal Foods are known and wishes to be known as a store that offers hard-to-find organic foodstuffs, so that people will just come through word-of-mouth of past customers.
Promotion – we will just put posters made out of recycled paper in malls and offices nearby our store so that people will take notice of our product offerings, internet advertisement, newspapers and television advertisement to attract a larger market. We have place in our website our products and we wish to start online shop for our product.
Since we are involved in providing wider organic food choices, Wal Foods is inclined for product differentiation, which is essential in positioning. Generally speaking, the product should be positioned so it can stand apart from competitive products. Wal Foods’ unique combinations that differentiate their products from other competitive offerings will enable our customers to define the important attributes of the business.
Place – we started with l only one shop that was selling our products in solely inside our stores. Deliveries have also been instigated as our stores progressed. When we established links with our suppliers, we expanded the supply of organic tropical fruits to malls. This increased the scope of our reach to our customers than just maintaining one store.
Pricing – Wal Foods has set all the prices of their goods to match the prices of their competitors although we offer better quality foods with the same price as our competitors.
References
Bingham, Frank G., Gomes, Roger, Knowles, Patricia A. Chapter 6: Market Segmentation, Positioning, and Demand Projection, Business Marketing. New York: McGraw−Hill Companies, 2005.
Business Insights. The Health Food And Drinks Outlook To 2006: Consumer Insight, Market Dynamics & NPD. London: Business Insights Ltd.
Schaik J.L., (2002); The Task of Marketing Management; J.L. van Schaik (Pity) ltd.