Kraft Foods Group’s once successful product J-E-L-L-O has seen declining sales lately, and this is due to the fact that the brand has lost positioning power in the mind of consumers. While J-E-L-L-O was once seen as a fun food that was directed at families, the latest marketing efforts have been directed at adults, and this has caused the brand to fade from family’s radars in recent years. Dessert consumption has also decreased a lot as people’s eating habits have changed, and this is also affecting J-E-L-L-O negatively because of the fact that the product is positioned as a dessert food in the mind of customers. Since people now a days prefer to eat snacks because of the fact that they don’t take time to prepare and are more time-efficient, Kraft Foods must embark in a mission to position J-E-L-L-O strongly as a snack product in the minds of its original customer target segment –families- once again. This is extremely hard, as there are a lot of snack brands out there that are already strongly positioned in consumer’s minds. To succeed in the snack industry, J-E-L-L-O will therefore have to try and differentiate itself from other brands by exploiting its “fun” factor or acknowledging that it is not the number one snack brand out there.

Article Source: http://adage.com/article/news/kraft-launches-campaign-revive-jell-o/243616/

Image Source: http://www.americansweets.co.uk/ekmps/shops/statesidecandy/images/american-kraft-strawberry-banana-jello-bigger-6oz-pack-11288-p.jpg

When companies become big, they often start diversifying their product line and service offerings. Hewlett-Packard, for example, sells PCs, printers, high-end business/corporate hardware, and service operations. This is not always ideal though, as addressing completely different customer segments can be a hard task for a single company to manage. As a result, Hewlett-Packard plans to split the company into two different companies later this week: one that sells PCs and printers and another one that sells corporate hardware and services operations. The advantage of doing this is that each of the two separate companies would be able to adopt a focus strategy that better addresses and focuses in on their respective customer segments, which are families and people that need personal computers/printers and businesses that need business hardware and services. This would be beneficial for HP since the company has struggled with its PC business in recent years due to the shift towards mobile computing in tablets and smartphones, while the corporate services market is a market that has grown at a much faster pace. Therefore, a specific company that adopts a low cost or differentiation focus strategy directed towards offering hardware and services to businesses would allow HP to position itself a lot better towards future growth in this corporate services industry. Basically, this business-oriented company’s management would now be able to focus all of its energy on the more profitable business of offering hardware and services to businesses while not having to worry about managing a declining PC business.

Article Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/05/us-hp-restructuring-idUSKCN0HU0QY20141005

Image Source: http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hp_split.jpg

Car companies constantly compete in the technological space, and they do this by continually incorporating new technology into their cars in order to differentiate them from competitors’ products. Tesla, which is an innovative car company that is known for selling cars that come loaded with the latest tech, plans to do this by announcing the incorporation of automated driving into its cars on an October 9^th special event, but it is not the only car company with this in mind. Many luxury car manufacturers such as Audi and Mercedes-Benz have already joined the race towards automated driving after realizing that it is the next logical step in the car industry. However, while automated driving might be a strong point of difference among car companies today, it wouldn’t be surprising for it to turn into a point of parity among these same companies in the near future. This is because as all car manufacturers scramble to incorporate automated driving into their cars to avoid being left behind on this new market opportunity, this new technology will stop being a characteristic that differentiates one car over another and will become a set standard that a luxury car must have in consumer’s minds.

Article Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-03/tesla-said-to-add-popular-automated-driving-functions.html

Image Source: http://www.athenna.com/bosch-automated-driving/athenna/web_design/teoria-de-design/