Marketing Report Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Marketing Report - Case Study Example Support 11 D. Conclusion 11 References 13 I. Analysis A. Marketing Challenge The marketing challenge is to grow revenues and to find the perfect marketing mix for the new product to be launched in June, to aid in the achievement of the revenue growth targets for Mackenzie and Marr Guitars (Finnbogason, 2013). B. Internal Analysis B.1. Finance The company is working on a tight cash flow situation, with some budgetary constraints emanating from that cash flow restriction. While they pay suppliers cash, deliveries for orders only occur about 90 days after the payment. This has implications on the ability of the company to convert capital to revenues, and has a bearing too on the ability of the firm to generate cash flow from inventories. Inventories take time to reach the trade, and this compounds the problem of not being able to turnaround capital into cash. All these things besides, the company is still open to increasing the promotions budget from $1,000 to $4,000, and though this is miniscule in comparison to the overall sales target of $1 million dollars for the whole year, from a cash flow perspective this can be a significant amount especially if the revenue targets on a monthly basis are not met, and the margins cannot justify the added promotional expense (Finnbogason, 2013). B.2. ... On the other hand, where the company lacks muscle in terms of promotions budgets, it makes up for with word of mouth and focusing on the price and the product attributes of the marketing mix for its guitar lines. The main positioning being high quality and low price, this positioning strategy is complemented well by its chosen promotions, place and general advertising strategies (Finnbogason, 2013). B.3. Operations One can glean from the way the company is set up that the online presence handles orders processing including payments processing, while orders fulfillment is done via third party logistics and fulfillment services. Product manufacturing meanwhile is outsourced to suppliers in China. That supplier has enough capacity to be able to run the projected volume sales of 100 guitars per month of Mackenzie and Marr Guitars, but may have problems doing so if any new customers engage them. That aside, the rest of the operations is concentrated on marketing, as well as product design , which are basically handled by the CEO John Marr. The other partner, Jonathan Mackenzie, is understood to have a hands off role in daily operations, leaving that to John. One can see that this operations model leaves the physical handling of the processed goods to third parties, from manufacturing to orders fulfillment, leaving the core operational functions of processing orders and payments, doing the promotions and marketing, doing the strategy work and doing product design work for new launches as the core operational competencies of the company itself (Finnbogason, 2013). B.4. Human Resources Outside of the partners, there are no significant personnel in the organization. All of the third party