What recommendations could you give to Paynes to improve the marketing mix of Poppets?

Authors Avatar

COURSEWORK
Table of Contents

Data Gathering        

Background:        

Promotion:        

Price        

Place        

Findings and Recommendations:        

Appendix B        


Aim:

What recommendations could you give to Paynes to improve the marketing mix of Poppets?

Secondary aims:

Product:

  • Find out which flavours should be added/taken away from the current range.
  • Find how the packaging could be changed to make the product more appealing.

Price:

  • Find out what customers think of the current price.
  • Which gender thinks that Poppets are over-priced, as compared to the other?

Place:

  • Find out the most popular point of sale for products such as Poppets
  • Find out where most 15-18 year olds buy their chocolate products.

        

Promotion:

  • Find out which types of promotion are effective.        
  • Make specific suggestions and give examples of how promotion should be developed.
  • Concentrate on the 15-18 age group, and which advertising works best to encourage them to buy the product.

How aim will be achieved:

Desk and field research will be carried out, to ensure that enough data is available - and that it is of a high variety. This will mean getting a relatively large sample to be surveyed, and collecting a lot of secondary data. A small focus group will be used to gather data about the product and its packaging, as well as the web-site.


Data Gathering

The most important research obtained was the primary data gathered through field research. This was the data from the questionnaire. All students of Business Studies in Year 10 had to survey at least 10 people with an identical questionnaire (set by the board). All of the results were then entered into a database, giving everybody a very large sample (665 completed questionnaires). This database could then be interrogated to show trends throughout the results.

Another source of primary data was obtained by interrogating a focus group into their views on many aspects of Poppets marketing. The focus group consisted of the following people:

  • 1 Male in 18+ age range
  • 2 Females in 18+ age range
  • 1 Male in 15-18 age range

Details of opinions, which were obtained from this focus group, are included in the sections relevant to the information obtained.

Secondary data was obtained primarily from research into the Poppets advertising schemes. Television advertisements for the Poppets range of products were viewed, and the web site was visited and downloaded. Looking at the promotion of Poppets was my main method for finding out their sales strategy, as the advertising the company employs shows clearly their target audience.

Advantages / Disadvantages of secondary research:

There are some problems with the methodology used to obtain data and to analyse it.

The database was compiled by people who lived in London, so practically no data was obtained from other areas within the United Kingdom.

Also the sample was not huge, as it contained the data from about 650 people. Although this is a relatively large number, it would not do for a serious market research attempt.

Using a database to record all the results is an advantage of the methodology, as it means we can get all sorts of data, and trace trends among consumers.


Appendix A
 houses the questionnaire used to collect primary data.

Appendix B houses the main secondary data found (web-site material).


Background:

The company which makes Poppets is called Paynes (full name is George Payne & Company), and has been around since 17th April 1896). However, Poppets have been made since 1937. Before then, the company specialized in blending tea and coffee, and later cocoa. Recently however (1998), Paynes was bought by a large corporation called Northern Foods. All the raw materials are refined on the Paynes site, so Paynes has total control over the production of all its goods (apparently). Poppets used to look very different to how they appear now. The packaging back in the early days was very boring and bland, and we have a photograph of very early Poppets packaging.

The packaging we can see on the left is completely different and is very plain compared to the vivid colours, which appear on the current packaging.


Poppets promotion always has very bright colours, and has a slightly retro feel. We can see examples of this in the above packaging, and in images from the Poppets.com web site, as shown below:


The language used to promote Poppets is for younger people, and is an attempt to be very ‘retro’. For instance, the Poppets.com web site constantly refers to viewers as ‘suckers’, and the characters believe themselves to be ‘the slickest Poppet eating people you will ever see!!!’ They are apparently ‘the funkiest, coolest people on out world’ and we are invited to ‘enter the funky world of Poppets’. This is hardly the sort of language most adults would feel particularly drawn to, which highlights the fact that Poppets is targeting a relatively young audience (about 12-18).


Promotion:

Promotion is a very important aspect of marketing, as it will have a very big impact on the number of sales achieved, and therefore the future of the products and the company. Promotion basically means advertising, but not just in the most obvious sense. It also considers packaging, the logos and graphics a company uses to get people to recognise it. Branding is also part of promotion. If a genuinely good product is backed up by good promotion, a strong brand name will be created, and a good reputation will follow. Word of mouth will then be an important form of advertising and promotion in itself. In fact, many consider word-of-mouth to be the most important form of advertising, as people are more likely to believe their friends/colleagues than claims on television adverts. But to get this going, a strong promotional strategy is needed from the start the product becomes available, and in some cases – even earlier (some products become successful due to excitement from consumers already around before the product was released). This of course not something Poppets can try. But Poppets do have to consider advertising and packaging, and their web-site. Their promotion is not as strong as some competitors (like Cadbury’s), so to improve the marketing mix, promotion needs to be looked at in detail and changed. First it is important to know how many consumers have had experience of the Poppets product.

Join now!

 

These results were the ones I expected, and show a definite trend. As people get younger, more have tried Poppets. The reason that this is true is that the advertising is aimed more at younger people (just look at their advertisements and their web-site). Therefore, the result for the amount of over 18s who have tried Poppets is the smallest. To make sure this is the case, we can find out how many over 18s have heard of Poppets as compared to other age groups.

The results are all of course higher than ...

This is a preview of the whole essay