Our Strategy At The Beginning
When we first started Markstrat, we have to admit, we were unsure about having one strategy. Instead, we had two different strategies for each product:
We had a competitive pricing strategy for SOFT. In order to create the perception of a low cost product, we set our price at the minimum recommended price, $250 in the first period. Another tactic was determining who we wanted to target. We focused on two segment groups: shoppers and savers. Before we started Markstrat, our professor, Elaine Williamson, advised the class that narrowing our target market to one group will be less complicated; however we decided to broaden our target market to two main groups, the Shoppers and Savers, and also having a small percentage of money allocated to marketing to the rest of the other segment groups.
On the other hand, for SOLO, we geared towards a quality positioning strategy. Since we did not have the option to change the actual qualities of the product, we wanted to create the perception of a high quality product by offering a high price. We also targeted high earners and professionals by distributing most of our marketing money to those two groups; however like SOFT, this product also left a small percentage of money for the other segment groups in the market. We invested a majority of our money in operations, specifically our commercial team.