Eco-friendly Plastics Technology is a green mat manufacturer founded in 2013 that provides environmentally-friendly nonslip plastics-based mats such as kitchen mats, area mats, and placemats for businesses and households. As a sales developer, without any marketing budget for trade shows or promotions, and with cold sales emails and free samples went to waste, I figured the company needed to change its approach of doing business.
Problem
It’s difficult for Eco-friendly Plastics to develop new business.
Problems for business:
- Customization limitation: the factory wasn’t able to support new customer-requested specs. Some products still required further quality improvements
- Confused product positioning: lack of competitive advantages, other eco-friendly brands obtained similar quality and functionality with much more competitive prices
- Couldn’t support long credit period: sizable distributors like IKEA, 7-11, and Carrefour who obtain strong bargaining power require payment method at least OA 90 to 180 days at an extremely low price. With insufficient cash flow and poor profit margin, we had no choice but to turned down the offer.
- Couldn’t reach international customers: the budget was only saved for R&D without clear objectives, zero marketing budget made business development almost impossible. 90% of the sales revenue derived from trading companies.
Problems for clients:
- Low value: product price is too high without competitive advantages
- Quality: some products didn’t meet the requirement of anti-slips
Solution
Create a product with competitive advantages that match the price.
To Eco-friendly plastics offer products include:
Choice of product for differentiation
Meaning product differentiation
Goal: Increase global sales revenue by 20%
Business strategy:
- Product: Create a product that match the price:
- Price:
- Place: Focus on increasing sales revenue from B2C first instead of B2B: 90% of the company sales revenue came from B2B (selling to trading companies) and 10% came from B2C (selling inventories to end users via e-commerce platforms such as Shopee, PCHome, and Yahoo). With zero marketing budget, it’s clear that the goal should be focusing on increasing sales from B2C, as B2B requires much higher selling expenses(i.e. trade show, slotting fee, etc.).
- Promotion: Focus on global markets instead of domestic market: selling while raising brand awareness
- STP
- segment target position
Product strategy
After field research at malls and online stores(B2C), I decided to focus on one product for differentiation.
- Product:
- Price:
- Place
- Promotion
