Maxis is facing intense competition from other network operators because of the price, product, customer service and quality. Its major competitors are Digi, Celcom and U-Mobile. Some of its competitors are big players having larger resources and wider geographical presence than Maxis. These competitors are in a better position to handle the global meltdown as well as falling demand and remain competitive.
3.0 Marketing Mix 4Ps
The marketing mix is a set of controllable, tactical marketing tools that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market. The marketing mix includes four Ps which are product, price, place (distributions) and promotion.
3.1 Product
Product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption and that might satisfy a want or need. It includes physical objects, services, events, persons, places, organizations, ideas, or some combination thereof. According to our research, Maxis provides the means of complete mobile and fixed-line telecommunications services as well as broadband and other Internet-related services. It also includes the media of mobile phones and other telecommunications equipments by which people can keep in touch.
There are products such as postpaid and prepaid plans for the consumers in Maxis. For postpaid plans, it has a few basic plans which are Value50, Value80, and Value150 (refer to appendix 3). These value plans are mainly for those who called often to their friends, loved ones and families. Therefore, customers tend to sign up for postpaid plan because they can even have supplementary lines. It has the advantage of free calls and SMSes to their supplementary lines. While for prepaid plans, there are various kinds of plan which are Hotlink Plan, Extra Plan and Hotlink Youth Club Plan (refer to appendix 4).
3.2 Price
The price is the amount that a customer pays for the product. It is determined by a number of factors including market share, competition, material costs, product identity and the customer's perceived value of the product. The business may increase or decrease the price of product if other stores have the same product.
Maxis has postpaid plans which are specially designed for the consumers that give the privileges of lower calls and SMSes rates to lessen the burden of users. This can attracts more customers to Maxis as it provides better packages.
3.3 Promotion
Promotion represents all of the communications that a marketer may use in the marketplace. Promotion has four distinct elements which are , , and . A certain amount of crossover occurs when promotion uses the four principal elements together, which is common in film promotion. Advertising covers any communication that is paid for, from and cinema commercials, radio and Internet adverts through print media and billboards. One of the most notable means of promotion today is the promotional product, as in useful items distributed to targeted audiences with no obligation attached.
Recently, Maxis is doing a promotion on Blackberry phones (refer to appendix 5). A Blackberry from Maxis helps users to accomplish more by keeping users in touch with information, colleagues, and friends on the go. Users will be able to manage their emails faster and easily with BlackBerry® Push Email. Besides that, it also has multimedia capabilities and full screen internet browsing is enabled in Blackberry. This type of PDA phones gives advantages especially for the businessmen.
3.4 Place
Place represents the location where a product can be purchased. It is often referred to as the distribution channel. This serves as the means for getting the product to the targeted customers. It can include any physical store as well as virtual stores on the Internet.
Based on our findings, we found that there are 29 Maxis Centres and 60 Maxis Exclusive Partners (MEP) outlets in Malaysia (refer to appendix 6). Customers can drop by any Maxis Centres or MEP outlets nationwide during their operating hours. Maxis provides a range of services for the consumers such as consumers can purchase and pay bills in these places.
4.0 Advertisement
Advertising is a specific communication task to be accomplished with a specific target audience during a specific period of time.
4.1 Advertisement appeal and execution
Advertising appeals should have three characteristics which are meaningful, believable, and distinctive. First, the product must be meaningful and will be able to point out the benefits that can make the product more desirable or attractive to the users. (ARMSTRONG, G., and KOTLER, P., 2009. Page395). According to our research, Maxis’ advertisement uses different characteristics of the comic cartoons in categories of races and ages to show that the company products and services are used by many users and big communities (refer to appendix 7). Appeal must be believable too. Consumers must believe that the product or service will deliver the promised benefits. Such an instance, Maxis uses advertisements to let the users know about faster speed of Maxis WAP Portal with Maxis 3G. Other than that, appeal should be also distinctive. Maxis is able to tell how the product is better than the competing brands in the market such as Digi.
Execution is to capture the target of market’s attention and interest. Maxis’ creative team was found the best approach, style, and format for execution. (ARMSTRONG, G., and KOTLER, P., 2009. Page395). Maxis use slice of life as the style of execution which shows one or more typical people using the product in a normal setting. For example, Maxis is using the comic cartoon advertisements to let the users have a lasting impression.
4.2 Headlines
Slogan of Maxis is simple, trustworthy, and creative. Why Maxis will use this slogan as their headlines? First, Maxis is simple because of their basic postpaid plans. The plans are designed with a simple model instead of complicated packages. Hence, customers can understand the plan easily. Second is trustworthy. Maxis is famous with its wide coverage signals all over Malaysia. With this better service, users will be more loyal to Maxis and other users may also consider switching to Maxis. Maxis are creative too. It has many different plans for different users so that they can choose the most suitable plan.
4.3 Visual Elements
Visual element is the element that usually when a consumer saw it and he can confirm that is what brand and products. It is just like a logo for a company. Visual element of Maxis is the green earth. When customer sees this logo of Maxis, they will definitely think of Maxis and our products. This green earth logo of Maxis means that it has a wide coverage of network in Malaysia and has a wide range of services for all the users.
4.4 Layout
Maxis always use green color as the layout colour for most of its advertisements. So when the users see green colour, they will definitely know that it is the layout for Maxis.
4.5 Advertisement Media
Maxis Company publishes their advertisement in various types of media such as in television, newspaper, banners and billboards. From time to time, Maxis organizes road shows at shopping complex, public places, parks and even in the campus. The main factor that made Maxis Company decided to use all sorts of different media to advertise is because they want to attract more customers to use Maxis products. Through media, it can also let more people know more about Maxis.
4.6 Evaluation on the Effectiveness
Maxis Company publishes their advertisement in many ways. Maxis itself does not want to miss out any opportunity to augment their advertisement. For an example, road show is one of the ways to promote Maxis products. It is because it can attract more people to walk to the booth and get to know more about Maxis. Besides that, the promoter can introduce the products to the customers easily by explaining the postpaid plans with different packages. This effectiveness can make Maxis products more marketable and the market can grow bigger through consumer relationship “friends to friends recommending”.
5.0 Conclusion
As a conclusion, to run a company well, Maxis should have the company’s SWOT analysis. Maxis is the largest network operator in Malaysia compared to other network operators. As for the strength for the company is that Maxis is the only telecommunication operator in Malaysia that offers iPhone. Maxis also launched its 3G service of Maxis3G and HSDPA which is a high-speed upgrade of the 3G network. In opposite of these strength, there are also weaknesses in Maxis itself. To consume sizeable amount of profit at the initial stages, Maxis expanded the network capacity with high financing costs. But somehow, Maxis users will be able to purchase an iPhone by just signing up for a new postpaid line. Maxis faces intense competition as other network operators are also come up with new ideas from time to time.
Besides these, Maxis must also know about the marketing mix of 4Ps of Maxis. Through the marketing mix of 4Ps, we know that Maxis provides many postpaid plan packages for the users. The price is reasonable and affordable as the users can choose what the value plan that they wish to sign up with maxis. Maxis always promote the products by doing advertisements through media that can attract more customers. Users can always visit Maxis centres for services because there are many outlets in Malaysia that provides the customer services.
As in other companies, Maxis itself also create advertisements in order to attract more customers to become the family of Maxis. Advertisements can attract the attention of people to take a look on it. Maxis’ advertisements also focus on strengthening and building long-term customer relationships. By advertising, Maxis will be able to compete with other network operators and able to survive in the long run.
6.0 Recommendations
Maxis Company is one of a leading telecommunication company in Malaysia. All the employees should play their role to maintain a good name of Maxis as long as possible. As the team of marketing consultants, we would like to improve the sales revenue of Maxis and maintain it by recommending some ideas for the company after doing our research.
First of all, Maxis should encourage the current customers to continue using our mobile network and attract more customers to join our big communities’ network by providing better services. This can help to increase the market share of the company in the communication network market. In view of the current economic downturn, many users choose to send messages instead of phone calls to save their expenses. Therefore, we recommend that the company should do more promotions such as cheaper call rates. Maxis company can have promotion like when the user’s call expenses already exceeds a certain amount and the following calls for the specific day will be free. Others than that, they can also give more rewards to the Maxis users under conditions applied. This can encourage more customers to call to others instead of sending a message.
Furthermore, we also recommend that the company should create various values of plans with reasonable and affordable prices that can help customers to save more money. Example such as the Value Plus plan RM50, RM 80, RM 150 and etc. According to our findings, we found that some of the cities or suburbs do not have enough or even do not have a Maxis centre or outlets. Hence, Maxis should have more service centres to provide the right information and better services to the customers.
In addition, Maxis’ advertisements are not interesting and attractive enough in the market, so it could not create higher attention from the viewer. Advertisement is a very important step to promote our company’s products. In a nutshell, Maxis’ advertisements should be more creative, meaningful, and interesting to attract customers’ attention that can helps us to increase Maxis company images as well as the sales revenue.
