Place
Any product or service that’s is to be purchased by a consumer in general has to be made available where and when the customers want to purchase it, whether or not the product is sold in a premium, upper class boutiques or in an everyday convenience store or supermarket, depending on how easily the target market will be able to get to it and how they will respond. This way a product gets to a consumer can also be described as a channel of distribution. Geocaching.com, is obviously only sold in one channel of distribution, this being straight from manufacturer to customer, as is the case with many e-commerce businesses. This is commonly referred to as channel one, out of the four most common channels of distribution, as displayed in the diagram. The advantage of this is that 24 hour selling can be achieved, costs are low, trade in new markets is possible and communication is easy, whereas problems include lack of trust (which is possibly diminished slightly in this case due to geocaching.com’s strong brand image) and lack of access to technology. Geocaching.com almost always uses a direct channel, except when authorized resellers (such as retail outdoor sports shops, catering to the geocaching.com target market of outdoor sports enthusiasts) sell geocaching.com’s merchandise, in which case this would be classified as going from manufacturer to retailer to consumer.
Promotion
Promotion gives the consumer information about the other aspects of the marketing mix; without it, consumers wouldn’t know about product, price or place. Forms of promotion include advertisements, sales promotion, personal selling and public relations. Geocaching.com is not a major user of one of the main aspect of promotion, advertising, using only websites such as Facebook and twitter to create awareness, however they heavily rely of viral marketing (a method of product promotion which relies on current customers to market the product by telling their friends about it) and the media to spread the word about the product. This is most likely influenced by geocaching.com’s USP (the fun, exciting and relatively niche activity of geocaching). Geocaching.com additionally uses forms of sale promotion to promote their product. Finally, customer service also plays an important role in the promotional aspect of geocaching.com’s marketing mix, with several ways to get email support and a separate feedback site for users to give opinions on the site. Promotion will be an important element of the marketing mix for geocaching.com, as one of their main objectives is to create product awareness.
Target Market
A target market/audience is essentially a group of customers with similar interest a business has decided to aim its marketing efforts at. A target market is oftentimes a market segment. A market can be segmented by things such as age, gender, income, likes/dislikes etc. Having asked a marketing assistant at geocaching.com, it appears that the target markets for geocaching.com are families, retirees and outdoor sports enthusiasts (namely hikers), as pointed out in appendix B1.
Competition
Competition can be as the person or in this case company with whom one is competing. Geocaching.com appears to have few major sources of competition due to it’s comparative size and success, however opencaching.com and terracaching.com are both fairly successful geocaching websites and could easily be described as competition for geocaching.com, although geocaching.com does appear to be the market leader as of now. The table below compares the various geocaching websites.
Data Analysis & Evaluation
Survey A Results (Survey given to current 43 geocaching.com users)
Question 1 - How
important are these features of geocaching.com to you?
Question 2 - How did you find out about geocaching.com?
Question 3 - Have you recommended geocaching.com to a friend before?
Question 4 - Are you aware of this video
[See appendix A]?
Question 5 - After watching the video [See appendix A] do you agree with these statements?
Reasons for purchas
ing/not purchasing:
Products p
urchased:
Question 10 - Are you in any way involved with geocach
ing.com’s facebook, twitter, flickr or youtube accounts?
Question 12 - Would you
describe yourself as...
Question 13 - Demographic Information
Survey B Results (Survey given to 40 teenagers)
Question 1 - Please watch the following video
[See Appendix] and answer questions below.
Question 2 - After watching the video, to what extent do you agree with these statements?
Evaluative Summary
Price:
Users’ opinions of price: Prices seem neither too expensive nor too cheap in the consumers mind in regards to merchandise, as evidenced by question 8, and prices for premium membership appear to be effective, with a small proportion of users not being able to afford it. These prices seem to be effective to the mostly medium income target markets that geocaching.com targets.
Sources of revenue: Upon analyzing responses the main sources of revenue for geocaching.com are from premium memberships (with 88.1% of users owning a membership) and additionally from merchandise (with 85.71% of users having purchased geocaching.com merchandise). With geocaching.com being the only licenser of geocaching.com trackables (dog tag that can be attached to objects and be tracked as they travel around the world), this is arguably one of the major ways that geocaching.com creates revenue from its merchandise, as backed up by the results. Purchasers also commented that they purchased more trackables and products in general due to bulk buying discounts and free shipping deals, which are a good example of sales promotion techniques. Geocaching.com stated that banner ads throughout their website were also used to create revenue, however upon secondary research it appears that these banner ads are solely used for the advertising of advertising space by geocaching.com itself, thus not creating revenue. The reason that this is not currently being utilized so strongly may also be due to the reason highlighted by Kelly Ranck, that they use ‘very little banner ads...in order to respect the community and keep the site relatively ad-free’.
Pricing Strategies: Through secondary data and application of theory, it appears that geocaching.com utilizes the pricing strategy of premium pricing, in regards to the membership, as premium content is being offered for the price, and moreover uses psychological pricing/ odd pricing in regards to the geocaching.com merchandise, with almost every price ending in ‘.99’. Geocaching.com most likely also uses cost plus pricing in conjunction with these strategies, a common pricing strategy used by many business which involves first calculates the cost of the product, then adds a proportion of it as markup. Due to the large number of users stating they purchase either premium memberships or merchandise, it appears that these pricing strategies are effective.
Product:
Branding and customer loyalty of geocaching.com: Geocaching.com appears to have a strong brand image and a high level of customer loyalty, as evidenced by multiple factors, such as the fact that geocaching.com’s store was greatly preferred over potentially cheaper third party resellers due to many users wish to support geocaching.com, as well as many users acting similarly in regards to premium membership. Relating to promotion, through utilization of PR and customer service (with a marketing assistant at geocaching.com even stating that ‘Our primary strategy is to listen to our community of geocachers.’), geocaching.com has created a strong community of followers for itself as well as a powerful brand image, and has thus appears to have created multiple repeat users and established itself as the market leader.
Geocaching.com’s place in the product life cycle: Through secondary data and application of theory, it appears that geocaching.com’s place in the product life cycle could be described as in the ‘Growth’ stage, as while the product is fully established in the market and is most likely the most profitable company (as indicated by the high level of users and advanced technology of the site in relation to competitors), the geocaching market is fairly niche and the company is still fairly young in terms of both sales and awareness.
Users’ opinions of product: In regards to the users’ opinions product, the most favorable aspects seem to be the encouragement of connection to nature, encouragement of a healthy lifestyle and most notably the ‘good way to sight see aspect’. It’s apparent that geocaching.com has emphasized the connection to nature aspect of it’s product, as evidenced by the graphics of the geocaching.com website and heavy nature theme shown of the publicity video (appendix A). The healthy lifestyle aspect of geocaching.com is implied indirectly through the premise of potential hiking and illustrated in a similar way through the use of a family hiking together up a mountain in the product video, thus potentially also appealing to one of their target markets (families, this additionally being backed up in the results to question 1).
While the above aspects seem to be somewhat effectively highlighted, however little to no emphasis is placed on the sightseeing aspect of geocaching.com. As a geocacher, I personally know that not only do many geocachers visit from other countries to geocache while sightseeing, but most geocachers place the caches in the first place because the place they are putting the cache is worth seeing. Upon doing secondary research, it appears this is heavily emphasized on the guidelines for placing a geocache. However, when you look around the website or the product video, this aspect seems to have much less emphasis placed on it when it is arguably one of the most important aspects of geocaching.com and geocaching in general, as chosen by geocaching.com users. This, therefore, could be a potential improvement to the marketing strategy, to place more emphasis on the sightseeing aspect of geocaching.com, thus encouraging a new market of travelers to try out the product.
Place:
Channels of distributions used by geocaching.com: In regards to the place, the fact that geocaching.com is an e-commerce business, it appears that geocaching.comʼs products are mainly either sold through the geocaching.com website or stocked in resellers (normally outdoor sports shops), therefore meaning that geocaching.com uses either direct distribution or through the medium of a reseller. These appear to be the most sensible and effective channels and distribution, with direct distribution being used to a larger extent (premium memberships, geocaching.com shops) than through a third party.
Most common way of users purchasing geocaching.com merchan
dise: With 61% people having bought geocaching.com products through the official geocaching.com shop, it appears that this is the most popular way of purchasing geocaching.com products. A notable point here would be that even though there are opportunities for potentially cheaper prices (evidenced by secondary research) by purchasing from an authorized re-seller, most users purchase products from the official shop, potentially denoting users’ consumer loyalty and geocaching.com’s strong brand image. However, the geocaching.com store caters solely to U.S. customers, indicating that geocaching.com merchandise would have to be purchased through a third party.
Promotion:
Ways geocaching.com is promoted:
In regards to promotion, the current use of viral marketing and ‘word-of-mouth’, in conjunction with a variety of other promotional strategies, such as utilization of social media sites (most notably Facebook as evidenced by the large number of respondents aware of the page) seem to be effective, with the geocaching.com community growing continuously. As well as users informing each other, the media plays a large role in this respect. With 414 known web article and multiple news and television articles and 1/4 of users interviewed finding out about geocaching.com this way, it appears geocaching.com has recently gained a large amount of media exposure which may well be partly responsible for the influx in users over the last decade.
A notable aspect of promotion geocaching.com uses is sales promotion, such as competitions (oftentimes in collaboration with other complimentary businesses, such as Garmin [GPS producers], Timberland [Outdoor clothing producers] and enjoyengland.com [Tourist Information service]), free trials (for example a free 30 day trial of premium membership for geocaching.com is given out with purchase of a Magellan eXplorist GPS). Public Relations is also a major part of geocaching.com’s strategy, with initiatives like CITO (Cache In, Trash Out; an initiative which actively encourages geocachers to clean up forests and parks) and GPS adventure maze exhibits, (fun yet informative maze style geocaching.com museums, oftentimes set up in science museums throughout the U.S.). Additionally, geocaching.com offers discounts for bulk buying as well as special offers as shown below.
Moreover geocaching.com is supposedly promoted through geocaching booths and events, however no users had even seen either of these, which could either indicate that this technique may not be effective or these effects are being used on too small a scale for geocaching.com users worldwide to comment on, most likely the latter.
Finally, geocaching.com does not appear to incorporate advertising into its marketing strategy as evidenced by the fact 0% of users have ever seen a geocaching.com advertisement. This could potentially be because the word-of-mouth/viral marketing perform the same effect and utilizing advertising would be cost ineffective. This being said, the social media used could be considered as advertising; customers may have not recognized this as a form of advertising.
Possible improvement in this category would slim, seeing as many promotional techniques could indeed puncture the homely brand image geocaching.com embodies or be extremely cost effective, but more advertising through different platforms could be a good way to reach out to new markets.
Effect of geocaching.com promotional materials: The publicity video which has been identified as effective by users, especially for new/potential users of geocaching.com and additionally has been viewed by a high percentage (88.1%) of users, indicating that sufficient access is being given to the video either through geocaching.com themselves or alternatively through viral methods. The results from question also indicate that the video is effective especially for new geocachers possibly indicating the video has importance in regards to viral marketing.
Target Market:
Geocaching.com’s current target market: In regards to the target market, the current markets being targeted by geocaching.com seem to line up with the features of the geocaching.com users, with 79.06% of geocaching.com users being in one or more of the target groups of families, retirees or outdoor sports enthusiasts, the biggest group out of these three being families, closely followed by outdoor sports enthusiasts. All these target markets appear to be target through a variety of ways, most notably in the product video , through the utilization of characters personifying the target market. It appears that overall geocaching.com’s marketing in regards to its target market is effective.
Potential new targets/improvements: An improvement in this aspect of geocaching.com’s marketing strategy, would be to reach out to more target markets, because as evidenced by the results to the second survey (Appendix C2), geocaching.com could to several other target markets ,such as the teenage market. With many members of this market owning devices that could potentially be used for geocaching, there is a whole market out there essentially just waiting for geocaching.com. As an added bonus, the product video (Appendix A) appeared to appeal to this target market as well, meaning current promotional material could be effective.
Competition:
Competition of geocaching.com: In regards to competition, as predicted, geocaching.com still does appear to be the market leader, as evidenced by the responses above, with only 9.5% of users regularly using other geocaching websites and geocaching.com being comparatively superior in regards to size, services offered, reputation and presumably revenue. However,
one benefit of other geocaching websites highlighted by users were the lack of restrictive measures taken into place to ensure the quality of the geocaches and geocaching community in general. This could potential be an aspect to improve by loosening said rules thus making the product ‘friendlier’ to current users.
Geocaching.com in comparison to other geocaching websites:
Conclusion
Having reviewed the marketing strategy of geocaching.com, a number of conclusions have been reached:
The prices of geocaching.com of both premium membership and merchandise (these appearing to be the main sources of revenue for geocaching.com) are favorable with users. The pricing strategies of premium pricing in regards to the memberships and psychological/odd numbered pricing, these being most likely used in conjunction with cost plus pricing
The product of geocaching.com seems to a well-marketed aspect of the marketing mix, with consumers seeing all the elements they’d wish to see in the product heavily emphasized, bar the tourism/sightseeing element of geocaching.com, a potential improvement to the marketing strategy. Users of geocaching.com appear to have strong brand loyalty, most likely due to the intelligent yet wholesome branding of the product. Finally, geocaching.com appears to be in the growth phase of the product life cycle.
The place aspect of geocaching.com’s marketing mix is a fairly simple one, with geocaching.com utilizing mainly the direct channel as well as using distributors. Additionally, the majority of people appear to purchase geocaching.com products from the official geocaching.com shop, this being somewhat of a benefit to geocaching.com as they retain all of the profits.
The promotion of geocaching.com appears to place a strong emphasis on viral marketing (with Facebook being a major medium for this) and word of mouth, in addition to other tactics such as sales promotion and direct selling. Furthermore, surveyed users reacting positively to the company’s use of publicity videos.
The target market of geocaching.com appears to comprise of mainly families, outdoor sports enthusiasts and retirees. This target market appears to respond mostly positively in regards to all aspects of the marketing mix. A possible improvement in this area could be the introduction of a new younger target market, as suggested by Survey B.
Finally, the competiton of geocaching.com seems to comprise of opencaching.com and terracaching.com, and navicaching.com and opencaching.us to a smaller extent. Additionally, compared to these businesses, geocaching.com does appear to be the market leader as evidenced by the comparative size, features and therefore presumably revenue. A potential improvement in this area linking in with the product aspect would be to loosen regulations regarding the placing of caches as this has encouraged customers to partially switched geocaching services in some cases.