Iams is Good for Life.

Planning and Launching a New Brand

        The development of any new product or brand requires careful management. This requires starting out with an understanding of the market and the identification of the target market to whom our new goods would be attractive. The Mission of The Iams Company is to enhance the well-being of dogs and cats by providing world-class foods. Nutrition that makes a difference through a Complete feeding System who uses the slogan “Iams is Good for Life”.  The Iams company wants to launch a new brand  of cat food believing they have found a gap in the market. The idea is the development of a new dry cat food, which can be used as a complete cat food or as a supplement to existing feedings.  This is differentiated as it is a vegetarian cat food. There are no other vegetarian cat foods on the market, but there are vegetarian dog foods that gain a good level of sales. The company want this to be a brand rather than only a single product, there will be different flavours, the range of offerings may also be extended to cat treats, cat milk, and possibly even cat toys.

        The company first needs to consider who the target market is, this will determine not only how the product is developed but also the perceptions that need to be considered when developing the logo and the marketing campaign.  The food has been created for cats, however, cats are not consumers, it is the cat owners who will be buying the product and it is these owners we need to appeal to.  Product differentiation, described in our book (pg 231) as “a positioning strategy…used to distinguish their

 products from those of competitors”,  can provide this reason and also a competitive advantage.

The first target market may be owners who themselves are vegetarian’s, and who want their pets to follow a similar diet.   However, by increasing the vegetarian market we would still be in a limited market, the number of vegetarians in many areas is unknown, as such to concentrate only in this market may be limiting potential sales.

        The increased awareness of nutritional needs of cats may indicate a complimentary target market. Although suitable as a complete food, this may also be marketed as a food to compliment cat foods containing meat to give cats a healthy and varied diet. Now we have two target markets, one is a niche market, aiming at the vegetarians, the other is as a complimentary food to the mainstream market, with the format making this an easy way to give a cat a more balanced diet.  

        Therefore, the first determinant of the target market is likely to be the status of the owner as a vegetarian, however, this alone does not give us much of a picture of the potential buyers, not enough to develop a marketing campaign and the logo.  TO do this,  we need to look at segmentations in the current market.  

As we learned, segmenting is the division of the consumer base, or potential consumer base, into categories where there are similar characteristics. There are a number of ways a market can be segmented but I think we will start with segmenting by demographics.  We can divide the market by characteristics such as age, gender or even ethnic background.

If we look at all cat owners we will need to make some assumptions like the  majority will be between 25 – 75, and although there are male and female cat owners, in my house anyway, it is more often the females that will make the buying decisions as a

part of their shopping.  We also could consider the use of geographic location or even characteristics such as occupation, income and education or we could look at using consumer life cycle stages, looking at factors such as marital status and if they have any children that we could appeal to.  

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These are all objective measures, but could also use some subjective measures as well such as personality inventories, which can provide us with some insight to  personal values, such as those who value fair trade or US made brands, and even owner lifestyle may be used to categorise buyers into groups with common traits.  With these concepts and possibly the use of psychographics we can get a clearer picture of our target market.  So with this information we will choose the profile of vegetarian cat owners to be those with a middle to upper level income and education. The ability ...

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