Unit 2 Marketing Essentials Assignment - Tommy Hilfiger

Introduction:

Marketing planning is considered as a comprehensive document of the outline of the advertising and marketing efforts for the coming year. The marketing plan highlights the marketing objectives within a specific timeframe. Hilfiger brand was established by US designer Tommy Hilfiger and Indiantextile magnet Mohan Murjani. After that, Murjani has designed h8is new organization Murjani International in 1970 (Global.tommy.com, 2016). The focus of Murjani was towards the less preppy and less expensive clothes to attract youth. After that Hilfiger had changed their strategy and focused towards the cheap clothes. However, new strategy developed negative feedback in US market and affected brand image. However, customer preferred blue jeans of other brands of di9fferent countries such as France and Italy. Apart from that choice of the customers had changed from jeans from jeans to wool sweaters. Therefore, Hilfiger has changed strategy and started to sell leather jackets and cashmere sweaters for Italian market. On the other hand Hilfiger started to sell their products through 1800 departmental stores (Homburg and Pflesser, 2012, p.l450). The organization has already expanded their business in Asian countries such as Japan and China. Therefore, this report is based on the evaluation process of their existing marketing plan and provides suitable recommendation to improve in future.

Task 1:

1.1 changing approach to marketing planning:

The traditional marketing is based on 4 different factors such as product, place, price and promotion. Generally the organization critically observed the audience composition, buyers’ behaviour, and geographical properties of the business location and nearby events. According to the history of Hilfiger brand, they started business as a joint venture organization with Indian textile magnet Mohan Murjani. The joint venture organization hadobserved the market demand and Tommy Hilfiger designed blue jeans to attract the young generation. However, their focus was to attract high economic level customers. Therefore, they sold blue jeans in high price. After the end of the joint venture contract Mohan Murjani had started his own brand named as Murjani International (Reinartz et al. 2014, p.294). According to the marketing planning of Murjani, they simply focused on the less preppy and less expensive products.
Hilfiger was still focused on the traditional marketing and adopted Murjani’s strategy and stared to sell less expensive clothes. As a result, their brand value is decreased and international customer still provided negative reactions about the products. On the other hand some popular US brands had got great respond from the France and Italian market.
The modern marketing strategy is depending on four different stages such as identifying, anticipating, satisfying and profitability. After getting negative reaction fromtraditional marketing strategy, Hilfiger has designed modern marketing policy and critically observed that European preferred wool sweaters, jeans, shirts and luxury items like leather jackets and cashmere sweaters. Hilfiger had found that those items are easily available in Italian market (Delaney and Huselid, 2012, p.952). After making proper identification, Hilfiger had tried to anticipate the future of the organization if they changed and adopts the new strategy which is based on the European demand in 30 different countries. In terms of advertisements, Hilfiger included celebrities in advertisements such as Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Beyonce, David Bowie and Supermodel Iman. Hilfiger had changed their product selling strategy. They had started to sell their products from 1800 different departmental stores. On the other hand the organization has also expanded their business and opened stores in China and japan.

1.2 Evaluate Hilfiger’s capability for planning its future marketing activity:

It has been noticed that Hilfiger had faced huge risk in US market regarding their traditional business strategy. The organization has reduced their product price for increasing product popularity. However, their brand value was also decreased. On another hand the customers had provided negative feedback about the product styles. In that crisis moment, the organization had implemented modern marketing strategy to increase the product sales (Guest, 2011).
According to the modern marketing strategy, marketing manager had followed four different steps such as identification of recent condition of market, anticipation of future market, satisfying customers and increase profitability.
The entire modern marketing process is depending on three different capabilities such as:

Human capabilities:

The human capabilities refer to the employee strength of the organization. The entire business operation of Hilfiger depends on the activities of human resources. The employees are divided according to their designation and department. In modern marketing process, marketing team takes most responsibility of the business. It has been observed that the marketing team has critically observed the market of US and identify the requirement of customers and inform the higher management about it (Carlile, 2012). In this case study, it has been noticed that the marketing team has informed about the trend of the customers and customer preferred wool sweaters, jeans, shirts and luxury items like leather jackets and cashmeresweaters. After that the marketing team has anticipated the future market condition and developed the future planning of the organization. The organization has redeveloped their business as per the plan of marketing team and monitored the organizational performance. After re-establishment of business, the marketing team has collected the customer’s feedback about the dress materials and new launching segment. The responsibility of marketing team was to maintain customer satisfaction.

Physical capabilities:

It has been found that Hilfiger had changed entire business operation to move out from the market risk condition. The organization has used their physical resource to modify their business operation. As stated by Brown and Eisenhardt (2013, p.348), tangible resources such as manufacturing unit, machineries, office, land, stores are considered as physical resource for a company. It has been noticed that the organization had protected physical resource and contact with more than 1800 new retailer to sell their products through more than 30 countries. On the other hand the organization has expanded their business on their basis of their production plant. The management was confirmed that their production plant has that capability to produce dress material to fulfil the global demand.

Financial capabilities:

In 1970 Hilfiger generated market penetration through their signature product blue-jeans. On that time period the organization had collected maximum profit from the market. This generated a strong financial support for the organization (Donaldson and Dunfee, 2014, p.253). On the other hand the private and government banks have given financial support to fulfil their new marketing plan.

1.3 Examine techniques for organisational auditing and for analysing external factors that affect marketing planning:

It has been observed that every organization has conducted the audit activity to understand and examine any mistakes of scope of the organization. The organizational audit is considered as an internal factor which contains of the inherent competencies of the organization. On the other hand it also expressed the structure of firm’s internal system. As a result management can understand the factors such as a condition of organization, events. The factor is influenced by the behaviour of employees (Krasnikov and Jayachandran, 2013, p.5).
It has been observed that management of Hilfiger had developed the external audit to understand the issues of external environment of the organization. The managers have found that issues are related with the external environment related factors such as trend of customers, condition of US market and competition in US market. The organization had found that international market had provided negative feedback about their products. As a result their brand value is decreased (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2011, p.82). On the other hand the customer did not prefer their old fashioned blue-jeans. Therefore, existing market risk has been identified bythe organization through external market audit.

1.4 Carry out organisational auditing and analysis of external factors that affect marketing planning in a given situation:

It has been noticed that marketing planning of the organization is depending on two different factors such as internal factor and external factors. The internal factors are defined through SWOT analysis and external factors are defined by PESTLE analysis:

Internal analysis:

SWOT analysis:

Strength

Old brand emotionally attached with the customers
Selling quality products and expensive products
Maintained customer satisfaction
High market value

Weakness

Normal people cannot purchase expensive products
Small variation in product
Fluctuating pricing strategy
Products cannot fulfil customer requirement
Did not follow market trend
Traditional marketing strategy

Opportunity

New product range launched to attract the customers
Developing products based on market trends
Sell products through 1800 departmental stores
Expanding in Asian countries

Threats

High market competition in global market
High bargaining chances of he suppliers
New licensing agreements for business development

External analysis:

PESTLE analysis:

Factors	Effects on organization marketing plan
P-Political	It has been observed that Hilfiger has planned to expand their business in almost 30 countries and two Asian countries. Therefore,the organization has to consider licensing agreement of those countries.
E-Economy	It is not cleared by the organization whether they have enough resource or not. If they have not enough resource then the organization has to take loans from banks. Therefore the organization has to consider the inflation, interest rates of bank and other financial resources. On the other hand the organization has to recruit new employees. Hence, the organization has to consider salary of new employees, employee turnover and energy costs.
S-social	It has been noticed that marketing team has conducted the external market research and found current market trend. Therefore the organization has to considered population, standard of living, fashion statement and culture of the business location. As stated by Hartmanet al. (2014), social factors provide either positive or negative impact on the business. The organization has planned to launches wool sweaters, jeans, shirts and luxury items like leather jackets and cashmere sweaters in US and global market after the critical market research. Therefore, it will be more beneficial for their business in future.
T-technology	It has been noticed that the organization had followed traditional marketing strategy from 1970 to 1985. Therefore less technology based market research was prime disadvantage for the organization. After that, Hilfiger had switched their marketing strategy from traditional to modern marketing strategy. In modern marketing strategy, the external market research and analysis was more technology based (Crane and Matten, 2014). However, the marketing managers had not got more opportunity to take help from technology. It was a great challenge for them to prepare market audit with limited scope of using technology.
L-Legal	It has been found that Hilfiger have not faced any legal discrimination regarding their management operation and business operation. Therefore, the management has to consider the safety regulation standard of different countries, legal agreement of business and employment law.
E-Environment	It has been found that Hilfiger has maintained green environment in their production unit and retail shops. Therefore the organization has spent more money to implement low waste, recycling and minimum pollution controlled unit.

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Task 3:

Executive summary:

In this section, the learner has planned to develop a new marketing plan for new product launch of Hilfiger in Gulf County Such As Dubai. Therefore, the organization has to arrange their new product launching ceremony in The Dubai Mall.

3.1 Write a marketing plan for a product or a service.

New marketing plan for their new range of products such as wool sweaters, jeans, shirts and luxury items like leather jackets and cashmere sweaters will be based on three different steps such as:

Research and planning:

In this step, the marketing team has to develop sets of research process such as business environment audit, current business position of the organization, macro environment, micro environment, internal environment and competitors’ analysis. The marketing team has to develop internal audit through SWOT analysis. After identifying the strength of the organization, the marketing team has to make it stronger so that the weakness becomes ineffective. On the other hand the opportunity helps marketing team to design perfect product launching and successful business in new market condition. Apart from that the market team has to conduct external audit through PESTLE analysis to understand the barriers of the external factors (Scott, 2015). According to the PESTLE analysis the organization will face different issues such as:

Political: The organization has to apply for the new business license for starting their business in Dubai

Economic: the organization has to select correct financial resource such as bank loans, business partners and shareholders because business expansion needs huge amount of investment.

Social: the marketing team has to conduct market research to understand current trend of Dubai customers.

Technology: the marketing managers have to take help of advance technology to monitor market condition and business condition.

Legal: The organization has to carefully maintain the employment law and health and safety law to avoid any legal discrimination.

Environmental: It has been observed that the organization has maintained environment related legislation in US. Therefore, it will be not so challenging for them to maintain environment related legislation in Dubai.

Human resource planning:

Apart for marketing planning, the organization has to develop new human resource planning for new expansion business. The activities of human resource management should be follow specific stages such as:

Recruitment new staffs
Training and skill development
Employee management
Performance monitoring
Employee motivation
Employee termination

Marketing strategy:

After developing the internal audit and external audit, the marketing managers have to develop new marketing strategy for the new business location. Therefore, the marketing managers have to maintain some steps to develop new marketing strategy. Those steps are as follows:

Mission statement:

The mission statement of the organization should be to establish successful marketing plan and implement some attractive marketing and promotional strategy to support the company business in Dubai.

Objectives:

To develop a perfect marketing plan after examining the external market condition
To understand the requirement of the new customer and select suitable range of product to increase sell
To assess the feedback of the customers for further improvement and increasing variety of product
To evaluate the competitive market and develop new marketing strategy after a specific timeperiod.

Strategy development:

The marketing managers have to develop new marketing strategy to fulfil the objectives. Afterthat the marketing managers have to develop the tactics and marketing mix to launch the product in Dubai market.

Actions and controls:

After launching the products, the marketing managers have to implement continuous analysis of the sales status. The marketing managers have to measure the business status and report to the higher management on weekly basis (Kotler et al. 2015). The marketing managers have to manage the pre-developed marketing mix and change the product design as per the requirement of customers.

3.2 Explain why marketing planning is essential in the strategic planning process for an organisation.

It has been observed that the marketing managers have implemented marketing panning after analysing 4 P strategies. Product, price, place and promotion are four important controllable factors for any marketing planning. On another hand the marketing managers have developed Ansoff’s matrix to identify different options for developing new opportunities for improving sales. After a critical review on the Ansoff matrix the marketing manager can understand condition of two important variables such as market condition and product preference (Hollensen, 2015). Therefore, marketing manager can easily assume the condition of existing market demand.

In that situation the marketing managers generally take any one option such as:

Remain in existing market through product development
Enter in new market

Therefore strategic planning process helps the marketing managers in different ways such as:

Market penetration:
The marketing manager can take low risk process such as market penetration after understanding the existing market condition through strategic planning process.

Market development:

The marketing managers can involve themselves in overseas market or a new market segment after developing strategic planning process.

Product development:

Marketing managers can develop their existing product based on the result of strategic planning process.

3.3 Examine techniques for new product development.

The new product development process is risky process than other strategic process. The marketing managers have to conduct market research and understand the requirement of the customers. In this case the marketing managers have to consider the lifestyle of the customers to select product segment. It has been generally observed that Dubai customers are very passionate about fashion. They always prefer new styles and the customer belonged in the high economic society. On the other hand, the marketing managers have to observed that that the customers are very brand conscious and product quality conscious. Therefore, clothes will be the right product to enter in Dubai market.

3.4 Justify recommendations for pricing policy, distribution and communication mix.

It has been observed that the customers are very brand conscious and product conscious. On another hand it has been found that the weather is always hot. Therefore the customer prefers good quality cotton clothes. It has been found that more than 60% customers are belonging in high economic group. Therefore the organization must be product concern rather than price concern. In order to attract more customers, the marketing team can select comparatively low pricing strategy for new range of clothing product. The organization has to implement digital marketing strategy and online promotion through social media sites to attract the new customers. The marketing executives have to improve customer relation to understand their needs and gradually change cloths material, style to attract the customers. The marketing managers have to increase contract with other retailer to sell their product. The entire sales of the brand will depend on the number of suppliers.

3.5 Explain how factors affecting the effective implementation of the marketing plan have been taken into account.

This simple marketing plan is based on simple marketing mix strategy and Key performance indicator (KPI). The marketing managers have to maintain four different factors effectively such as product, price, place and promotion to improve the business gradually. On the other hand the marketing managers have to consider variable through key performance indicators. Key performance indicators will help marketing managers to identify net revenue in Dubai market or customer loyalty matric. As stated by Kotler et al. (2015), customer loyalty matric will considered by the government through the consideration process of unemployment rates.

Conclusion:

This plan is based on the new marketing plan for Hilfiger. The learner has developed new marketing plan for the new entry in Dubai market. The learner has added Gantt chart and budget planning for developing the new business market.

Task 4:

4.1 Explain how ethical issues influence marketing planning:

Ethics is the substantial area for business operation of Hilfiger. It has been observed that sometimes ethics and business laws create barriers in the business operation. It has been found that, managers have faced conflicts due to the conflict about to choose any one decision from two right decisions (Crane and Matten, 2014). On the other hand the ethical code of conduct protects the health of employees. On another hand the reputation of the organization depends on the product quality and health and safety of customers. Therefore, good marketing planning should not allow any kind of unethical marketing practice.

4.2 Analyse examples of how organisations respond to ethical issues.

The human resource management system of the new expansion unit of Hilfiger should be well planned. They have to monitor the performance of the employees in a regular manner. If any kind of workplace conflict happen between two employee, then human resource directly suspend those employees and start investigation (Scott, 2015). After that the guilty employee would be punished by legal process.

4.3 Analyse examples of consumer ethics and the effect it has on marketing planning.

It has been found that the consumer ethics protects environment, animal and customers. The marketing team has to develop good marketing plan to stop immoral in product sales or product purchase (Crane and Matten, 2014). This will create bad situation in future business. For example, if the sales staffs of Hilfiger will found that product purchasing strategy of the customers are illegal or against the law, then the company will not consider consumer right for selling clothes. If the organization will allow it, then it will affect the market and the unethical behaviour of the customer will spread gradually.

Conclusion:

This report is based on different prospective of marketing planning. On the first section the learner has compared marketing audits such as internal marketing audit and external marketing audit. After that the learner has presented the main barriers of marketing planning. The learner has designed a new marketing planning for Hilfiger in order to expand their cloth business in Dubai market. Finally the learner has demonstrated different ethical issues in marketing planning process.

Reference list:

Books:

Kotler, P., Keller, K.L., Manceau, D. and Hémonnet-Goujot, A., 2015. Marketing management (Vol. 14). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Scott, D.M., 2015. The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons.
Crane, A. and Matten, D., 2014. Business ethics: Managing corporate citizenship and sustainability in the age of globalization. Oxford University Press, USA.
Hartman, L.P., DesJardins, J.R. and MacDonald, C., 2014. Business ethics: Decision making for personal integrity and social responsibility. McGraw-Hill.

Journals:

Chaudhuri, A. and Holbrook, M.B., 2011. The chain of effects from brand trust and brand affect to brand performance: the role of brand loyalty. Journal of marketing, 65(2), pp.81-93.
Krasnikov, A. and Jayachandran, S., 2013. The relative impact of marketing, research-and-development, and operations capabilities on firm performance. Journal of marketing, 72(4), pp.1-11.
Donaldson, T. and Dunfee, T.W., 2014. Toward a unified conception of business ethics: Integrative social contracts theory. Academy of management review, 19(2), pp.252-284.
Brown, S.L. and Eisenhardt, K.M., 2013. Product development: Past research, present findings, and future directions. Academy of management review, 20(2), pp.343-378.
Carlile, P.R., 2012. A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product development. Organization science, 13(4), pp.442-455.