Background of the company
Brand Logo:
Company Name: Edge
Size: 10080 employees
Turnover: £56.89 Billions/year (2010)
Products: PDA, laptop, mobile phone and Tablet device.
The company was established in Hong Kong in 1991. The initial name was 惠風(HUIFENG). At first, it was an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to help some well-known computer companies to produce their notebook computers. After few years, the company became very successful and we decided to create our own brand of smart phones and computers. Therefore, we merged related technologies companies and decided to change the company’s name. In 1998, the new brand was created and it was named Edge.
The first major products, which are smart phones and computers was made in 2006. It was first released in the United States for pre-order on March 23, 2008 and has since been introduced in many countries including United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore. Our products have very high technology but it is very easy to use for people. The consumers of our products are high end market.
In May 2011, the new product development team thought they have come up with ultimate tablet device, named Edge Thor, to compete with Apple iPad.
Mission statement
We hope that our products could provide technological easy to all levels of consumers. Therefore, we prefer to develop different types of products to suit different people. Additionally, we have made our products of high quality with reasonable prices. Therefore, their mission statement is:
“Create hi-tech for all consumers with high quality and reasonable price, enhance employees’ career abilities”
Product introduction
Edge Thor is a portable 8.5-inch tablet with a digital pen that can do more for consumers than consumers could imagine. “More sharing, more joy” is the core idea of this product. The most outstanding unique feature of Thor is that it could be used as a projector. Purchasers could share images, videos or other visual technologies with their friends. Moreover, Edge’s Thor also provides HD screen, blue tooth, word processor, USB and handwriting input. Thor puts customers in control of any situation.
Specs
Size: 200.4mm x 137mm x 13.2mm
Weight: 537 grams with battery
CPU: Intel Dual-core
Display: Multi-Touch display with Retina technology
1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch
Screen: 8.5 inch touch-sensitive screen
Colour: metallic grey, pink, white, blue, red, purple, black, gold, silver
Price: £319(16G)、£399(32G)、£479(64G)
Macro Environment
1. PEST analysis
Micro Environment
1. Market Forecasting
SWOT analysis
Marketing objectives
1. Maximize profits
The Edge will maximize the profits by gaining at least 1% of Thor profit that it sells within 2012. Like Apple, it also expects to gain profits from IPAD at least 1%.
2. Gain high satisfaction
In 2012, Thor, the Edge hopes to gain above 80% satisfaction among the owners of Thor. From the apple success experiences, the Edge realizes high satisfaction could benefit the following sales of products.
3. Gain market share
The Edge will gain the 30% market share in the 2012.
Gartner (2011) according to the ...
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Marketing objectives
1. Maximize profits
The Edge will maximize the profits by gaining at least 1% of Thor profit that it sells within 2012. Like Apple, it also expects to gain profits from IPAD at least 1%.
2. Gain high satisfaction
In 2012, Thor, the Edge hopes to gain above 80% satisfaction among the owners of Thor. From the apple success experiences, the Edge realizes high satisfaction could benefit the following sales of products.
3. Gain market share
The Edge will gain the 30% market share in the 2012.
Gartner (2011) according to the market share distribution forecasting, non- iPad brands might gain more opportunities in the 2012, around 32% market share.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/04/iPad-to-dominate-tablet-market-until-2105.php
Analysis of iPad
The apple company was incorporated in 1977 and has been in existence for about 35 years. They have core products such as the iPad, iphone, ipod, mac computer. They also make different accessories for their product like keyboard, mouse, speakers and headsets. Currently, it is the largest technology firm in the world, with annual revenues of over $60 billion.
Apple launched its first iPad in 2010 and the iPad 2 in 2011. Over the past 2 years, the iPad has topped in tablet market globally. Presently, iPad has 95% market share in the tablet market worldwide, while all other tablets share 5%. For every 10%, IPad has 9.5 % while all other tablets share .5%. Given the statistics, it can be assumed that at least 9 out of 10 people that buy a tablet worldwide buy the iPad.
The general features of the iPad include camera and HD video recording which was added to iPad 2. The iPad is about 9.56 inches high, 7.47inches Wide, 0.5 inches Thick, and weighs 1.5 pounds. The major colours are silver and Black and it has mono speakers. http://www.theverge.com/products/iPad-wi-fi/127
Research shows that 22% of people that use tablets are people within the age of 18 to 29, it also shows that 62% of people in full time employment use a tablet, while 78% of people aged between 30 to 50 years use tablets.
Weaknesses of iPad
- It is quite expensive. Even the iPad 1 costs over £300.
- The iPad is not really good at multitasking.
- It does not have wireless synchronization
- Transferring files between the iPad and other devices is quite difficult because it doesn’t have a USB port. Saving and highlighting files from the internet is quite difficult and you have to be online to view them.
- Apple’s social network is based around iTunes music, and GameCenter, its social gaming service. Apple has not been able to go as deep integrating Facebook or other social networks into its products as some Android devices or Microsoft's Windows have.
- The iPad doesn't support Flash player, which poses a hindrance for users as they can't connect to sites that require flash players.
Analysis of iPad in the UK market
Apple’s iPad has 73% of the market share in United Kingdom. And therefore, it is going to be the major competitor of Thor in the UK market.
- 48% of iPad users spend the most money with their iPad compared with other devices like laptops, phones, cable television or computer.
- 33% of them have paid for 30-49 applications, 26% have paid for 0-9 applications, 24% have paid for 10-19 applications, 11% have paid for 50-99 applications and 6% have paid for over 100 applications.
- 57% of the people that have the iPad also have the iphone.
- 70% of the customers feel that there iPad is excellent, 24% feel that it is the best thing in their life, 6% feel that iPad is ok but they can live without it while 0.2% feel that it is not that great.
- Only 10% are of the opinion that the iPad is perfect and would not change anything about it, 20 % of their customers want the iPad to be lighter, improvement on its camera and battery life, 17% want better screen resolution, 22% want better speakers.
- 98% of the people that have iPad use it for internet browsing, 94% use it for emails, 88% use it for music and videos, 78% use it for shopping and social activities, 69% use it for reading newspapers and magazines,63% use it for reading books and 48% use it for work.
http://idea.imano.com/2011/06/uk-iPad-usage-infographic/
Comparison
Brand Awareness
Price After-service
Thor
iPad
Function Appearance
Brand awareness: There is no doubt that Apple is the most famous IT Company in the world nowadays.
After-service: However, Apple’s customers always complain that they have to fix their products in Apple store. We can provide our users home services.
Appearance: Our consumers can make a choice of their favorite design, and iPad’s users can choose different colors of covers.
Function: Our ultimate tablet Thor can be used as a projector for sharing entertainment, it is our initial product.
Price: Thor’s price is lower than iPad, and we are trying our best to provide our customer best value for money.
Our target market
Although iPad has 73% of market share in the UK, the research conducted by our company’s suggests that most of the people that use iPads are business men and women, and some of the people that use it are not satisfied with some of its functions.
Hence, the Edge company has decided to target those that are not satisfied with iPads and those that do not use the iPad at all. We want to create a niche for Thor, that keeps the customers coming back by providing features that the prospective customers want and no other tablet is offering in the market.
The launch of the Thor in United Kingdom is mainly going to target;
- High school students
- University graduates
- Recent graduates
All of our customers are between 16 and 30. We have chosen to target our product to this group of people because most of them do not use iPads in the United Kingdom.
Analysis of research questionnaire
Before we launch the Thor tablet and in other to gain more insight into the behaviour of our target market in United Kingdom, our company conducted a survey research. We sent out 200 questionnaires to respondents, both male and female, however our analysis is on the 156 respondents that filled and returned the questionnaire.
- 27% were from the ages of 16-20, 47% are between the ages of 21-25 years and 19% are between the ranges of 26 to 30 years.
- Only 33% of the respondents have iPads while 67% do not have iPads
- Of the respondents that have iPads, 11% said they were dissatisfied with the short battery life, 8% said it is too heavy, while 78% said that it is unable to transfer documents easily.
- 54% said that they do not have iPads because the price is too high, 63% said that they don’t need it because they have alternatives, and 15% said that they do not like to follow the trend
- 24% want the word processor to be added to the iPad, 22% want the blue tooth to be added to the iPad, 63% want the USB to be added to the iPad and 19% want the handwriting input.
- 49% said that their ideal price for the iPad is less than £ 200, while 53% said that their idea price for the iPad is between £200-£400 while only 5% said that their idea price is between £400- £600.
- Most of the respondents also want improvement on the colour, speakers, screen resolution, size and thickness.
We found out that most of the people that do not use iPads are college students, university students and recent graduates from the ages of 16-30.
The behaviour of our target
- They are young people between the ages of 16-30; most of them are in university and high school
- They want features that will make the tablet more fun to use and helpful with their school work, hence:
- They want a tablet that will incorporate all the features that need into one system and serve different purposes
- They do not want to spend too much money on a tablet
- They have a strong desire for entertainment and social networking
Alternatives
Although, the iPad domains the tablet market in the UK with 73%, we are aware that there are also other tablets gaining acceptance and popularity in the UK market, like the Kindle, HTC flyer, Nook tablet and Galaxy tab.
- Samsung Galaxy tab, is the second most popular tablet. It costs £399, its about 4.8 inches wide and weighs .76 pounds. It offers USB connectivity and can perform the range of activities that the iPad does. The weaknesses of this tablet highlighted by the users are that the screen is not so sharp and it doesn’t have a camera.
- The Kindle fire cost £199; it is 4.7 inches wide and weighs 0.99 pounds. It is mainly for storing and reading books. The weaknesses highlighted by the users are that Amazon Appstore has limited selection and the appearance of the kindle itself is not so interesting and inspiring.
- HTC flyer, cost £469, uses a stylus has about 4.8 inches wide and can perform the activities that the iPad does. The weaknesses of this tablet highlighted by the users are that it is too expensive, the Stylus is easy to lose and it cost about £50 and the camera has a Poor quality.
- Nook tablet cost £249; it is 5 inches wide and weighs 0.88 pounds. The tablet is mainly for reading books. The weaknesses of this tablet highlighted by the users are that the speaker is not so good, cannot easily side load apps and it can only be charged with its own MicroUSB cable.
From above, we see that the tablet market in UK is thriving and innovations has not ceased. We have developed the Thor tablet, not just to be a another kind of technology in the market, but a fun friend that students all over the United Kingdom can afford and cannot do without on daily basis we will to create a niche for Thor, that keeps the customers coming back. Only about 3.6 million people own tablets in the UK out of a population of over 60 million people. There are growth opportunities for Thor in the UK market.
In order to enable more young people to enjoy the high quality products without spending too much money, we conducted a survey and come to the following strategies and Implementations:
Pricing Strategy
First, find the prices of similar products, for example iPad2:
Second, according to our questionnaire, we recognize that the consumers of our target market generally want the price below £400. However, the cheapest price may not be competitive sometimes, since customers will question the quality of the product. In addition, due to the high cost of research and development, our profit margin will be too narrow if the price is too low.
Third, after all the surveys and analysis, our pricing strategy will make a balance between making profit and providing our customers with the highest value for money.
Network Marketing
Stuff: Marketing, Sales and IT Department
Cost: Almost 0
(1) As we all know, Google ranks first among the world, Yahoo! Search and Bing search are also very popular at present, so the registration in these search engines is essential. We will also make an effort to improve our rank in those search engines.
(2) Cooperate with Amazon, set links in their website to our homepage. This will help increasing our click rate and awareness, and their customers may become our customers, too.
(3) Sending e-mails to our users when need their feedback. To prevent sending the offensive e-mail, we will use the site's feedback feature to record if the user is willing to accept the e-mails from us.
(4) Regularly sending electronic journals to the registered users, it will not only provide timely information and exciting activities to the users, but also increase our website hits.
(5) We will register in Facebook and Twitter, and publish our news in them. It is a good way to get closer to our existing and potential customers.
Loyal Customers Marketing
Stuff: Marketing, Accounting, Sales and IT Department
Cost: £500,000
(1) We will every week randomly select 10 lucky user who had already give us the feedback of our tablet during the three months before Olympic Games, and give him or her the limited Olympic version tablet which is not for sell as the prize, in order to encourage customers to give us advices of improving our products and services.
(2) We will hold a series of video games contest in our stores; customers must attend these contests with the tablets they bought. The final game will hold in our biggest flagship store in London, and the participants can get the vouchers of different value which can be used to buy any product of our company.
(3) We can collect the information of customers’ preference and behavior by sending questionnaires via emails and get their feedback 1 month after their purchase. Then we can store all the information in the database and when we want to launch new products, we can analyze those data and then we can meet the customers’ needs accurately.
(4) We plan to cooperate with Slightly Mad Studios, a famous video game company which is popular among young people, since we have the same target market, we can share the information we already had to expand each other's databases. Then we can achieve win-win through a series of mutually beneficial activities and brand linkage.
Campus Marketing
Stuff: Marketing, Accounting and Sales Department
Cost: £500,000
(1) To be the sponsor of universities’ arts festivals, sports meetings and theme parties, and title all the events, can make a qualitative leap of our company and product. And we can provide them our tablets as the award if they need.
(2) It is an opportunity to advertise in the school handbooks, brochures, and campus maps to the new students at the beginning of the academic year. Also we can put our company’s logo and URL to the footprint of each page.
(3) We can hire some university student to paste our posters on school’s bulletin boards and leave the leaflets on the tables in the restaurant every week, which is also the cheapest and most effective way of publicizing.
Advertising Marketing
Stuff: Marketing, Accounting, Sales and IT Department
Cost: £7,000,000
(1) Comparing with put our advertisement on newspapers, online advertising is a more effective way to promote the image of our product, since there are far more young people prefer searching the internet than reading newspapers or journals. We are ready to publish online advertisement in Youtube and Facebook all the year round. (£1,000,000)
(2) Invite the recently most popular British-Irish boy band “One Direction” to appear in our commercials and broadcast them on BB1, BBC2, ITV1, CHANNEL4 and FIVE six times a day for the coming year. (£4,000,000)
(3) Due to the London Olympic Games next year, more and more people will come to London. As a result, we will put our advertisement in bus and railway stations in London during the Olympic Games which will make our product quickly knew by the people all over the world. (£2,000,000)
Control
- Revenue and profits:
Cooperate with Sales and Accounting Department, collect the data of Sales every three months to calculate and forecast the profitability.
- Customer Satisfaction:
Ask the information from IT Department to know how many users are satisfied with our Thor and where the consumers are satisfied or dissatisfied every month.
- Market Share:
In the end of the year, invite DJS Research Ltd to make a professional research of our market share and help with making marketing strategies for the next year.
References
Arthur, C., (2011). Apple's 73% UK tablet market share 'set to fall', , (Accessed 09/11/11)
Baeet K., Sarvagod M. and Vaze R. (2011) UK PESTLE analysis: Batch 30, ITM, Matunga.
Retrieved 16th December, 2011 from
, P. (2011) iPad 1 earns 95% satisfaction rating. CNNMoney. Retrieved 16th
December, 2011 from rating/
Frommer, D., (2011) Apple's three biggest weaknesses , (Accessed 12/11/11)
Imano., (2011) UK iPad usage, ( Accessed 20/11/11)
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/7/2544177/nook-tablet-vs-kindle-fire-vs-iPad-2-tablet-comparison
Infinite Research (2011) Worldwide tablet market forecast report. Retrieved 16th December,
2011 from
Journalism Organization (2011) The tablet revolution: Who tablet users are. Project report on
October, 2008. Retrieved 16th December, 2011 from
Perez, S (2O11) . ReadWrite Mobile.
ReadWrite mobile. Retrieved 16th December, 2011 from
2105.php
Ricker, T., (2011) Nook Tablet vs Kindle Fire vs Nook Color vs iPad 2 comparison. Retrieved 9th November 2011. http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/7/2544177/nook-tablet-vs-kindle-fire-vs-iPad-2-tablet- comparison.
APPENDIX
QUESTIONNAIRE
Dear Respondents,
We are a group of students from the Business school in Loughborough University and we are conducting a survey on the iPad. We ask that you please assist our research by filling this survey. It will only take two minutes of your time. Thank you.
SECTION A
Gender (A) Male (76 people) (B) Female (80 people)
Age range (A) 16 -20 (42 people) (B) 21-25 (74 people) (C) 26-30 (30 people) (D) Others (2 people)
Course _________________________
SECTION B
- Do you have an iPad? (A) Yes (52 people) (B) No (104 people)
- If yes, what are you dissatisfied with?
- Short battery life. (6 people)
- Too heavy. ( 4 people)
- Low speakers.
- Unable to transfer documents easily. ( 46 people)
- Others please specify. (2 people)
- If no, why don’t you have an iPad?
- The price is too high. (56 people)
- The functions are too complicated.
- I don’t need it because I have alternatives. (66 people)
- I don’t like to follow the trend. (16 people)
- Others please specify. (2 people)
- What functions do you think can be added to the iPad?
- Word processor. (38 people)
- Blue tooth. (34 people)
- USB. (98 people
- Handwriting input. (30 people)
- Others please specify. (8 people)
- What is your ideal price?
- Less than £ 200 (76 people)
- £ 200 - £ 400 (82 people)
- £ 400 - £ 600 (8 people
- £ 600 - £ 800
- More than £ 800
- Is there anything you would like to be improved on the iPad?
Make it smaller, lighter colourful, play dvds and cds and so on
