Question

You work for an international food and beverage company, and the CEO of the company wants to introduce a new beverage product in the US market for 2021. Your team is charged with the following tasks:

Develop a new beverage product concept that can be brought to market by 2021. The product should have broad appeal for the US market (i.e., nothing illegal or distasteful).

Present a five-year marketing plan to upper management that includes a description of the product, a plan for where it will be sold, a summary of the existing competition, and recommended promotion strategies that can help to sustain sales volume and profits for several years.

The CEO is especially concerned about the risks of a recession in the next 2-3 years, so your plan should consider ways to make the new product less susceptible to recession. You should assemble a document that addresses each of these components for the product launch. The points assigned to this project are evenly divided among 5 components -- product description, competition summary, marketing and promotional strategies, recession resilience, and presentation quality (40 points each). So, you should allocate most of your effort to the economic components of this analysis.

Answer 1

Developing a new beverage product concept:

As per the current situations in 2020, the world has faced health issues and financial crisis, the most common health problem people are facing in 2020 is cold and flu. Therefore, the company should plan a beverage which has function and properties of defence! Defending with cold and flu. The beverage line created should be vitamin drink for fighting flu!

Step 1: Planning of product:

- Understanding consumers: We need to step into the market to learn what are the demands of majority of the customers when it comes to vitamin drinks, it is important to learn about the customer tastes and feedbacks.

Now let's plan the product according to our consumer research data:

- Ingredients: Filtered water, crushed red berries 20% , raspberry juice, natural sweetner, citric acid 20%

- Packaging material and printing, design of packaging

Step 2: Set up cost:

- Raw material cost

- Machinery cost

- Transportation cost

- Labor cost

- Packaging cost

- Research and Development cost (Includes testing of product)

- Other costs like electricity, stationery.. etc

Step 3: Selling structure of the product:

• Place and understanding of end users:- Studying of local and regional market

- Finding out locations of highest beverage sales.

• Understanding the market: Developing and planning the strategy that we will follow for selling the product.

For eg: Two tier selling system:

The company will sell the product to distributors and distributors will sell it to the retailers. The marketers need to contact the distributors, make sure the distributor are targeting all the locations which has highest demands (like public places stores, supermarkets, etc)

• Understanding competitor's marketing analysis: If we study the complete competitior's marketing data and metrics of past few years, that will help us understand exactly which areas we can target on, to stand out in the market and improve our marketing plan.

Existing Competitors:

- Health-Ade Kombucha

- Dirty Lemon

- Daily Harvest

-  WTRMLN WTR

- Ample

• Hiring people who can carry out the work: Example, hiring salesmen- To sell beverage to distributors.

Step 4: Promoting the product:

- Digital Advertising:

1. Advertising on social media
2. Google ads
3. Advertising on television

- Offline Advertising:

1. Print ads in magazine
2. Posters
3. Banners on Supermarkets

- Selling out free samples in limited supermarket stores to taste the beverage.