Executive Summary
The laptop retail market includes laptop sales that are sold through traditional brick and mortar retail outlets and now through mail order and online stores in the form of websites. Laptops are personal computing devices that can be used when the user is on the go to accomplish their own computing goals. Laptop retailing has major concerns that are focused on ensuring that the retailer’s own investment on the products does not end up remaining on the stores, instead, it should be made available for purchase by the consumers by ensuring that the information about what the retailer offers is known to the retailers and that the product fits the description of the retailers. The information about the available laptop models, prices and where to acquire them is what marketing is all about for laptop retailers. This report is an analysis of the laptop market and is useful for a laptop retailer in designing a marketing strategy for his laptop business.
This report analyzes the Marketing mix four elements which are primarily referred to as the 4 P’s namely Products, Place, Prices and promotion that companies modify, in a way so as to generate sales through their own marketing strategies for a laptop retailer. It also scans the environmental factors that are likely to affect the performance of a laptop retailer such as technological, social, economic and regulatory factors. This report recommends that the best method for a laptop retailer to adopt for the purposes of marketing his business and products is one that takes care of the whole laptop ecosystem.
Product:
A laptop is a portable personal computer device that is used in a variety of settings that include at work, for personal multimedia, and in education. The laptop market has benefited from lowering prices brought by efficient production methods that have dramatically reduced the retail prices of the laptops. The use of laptops has witnessed steady growth over the few years with personal computing devices quickly becoming single most essential household items. Today, all over the world in a large proportion of households, they at least own one computing device such as a laptop (Deng et al. 1197). The demand for laptops has been increasing due to a growing corporate sector and well as digitization of the education in both developing and developed economies. The current demand for laptops over the coming years is likely to propel even higher in the coming years with growing popularity of laptops for commercial and public projects use because they perform well, have extended battery life and are light. The demand for laptops in many world economies have also been derived from increasing demand for real-time communication, and collaborative workspaces that have been created by changing working styles witnessed in the corporate and public service sectors (McMahon and Romana 420).
The only thing that retailers need to be aware of is that a growing popularity, as well as adoption of tablets and smartphones, is to some extent likely to hinder the growth of the market over the coming years. This leaves the marketers with the responsibility of identifying new and innovative strategies to catapult laptop growth sales for retailers. For manufacturers, they may find it important to integrate the features of tablets and smartphones such as integrated Wi-Fi, touch screen display, and wider area wireless technologies that will drive industry demand. Consumers are now more concerned about price, the weight of the laptop and performance of the laptops when they are making purchasing decisions of the laptops.
Marketing Mix
Marketing mix is described as a combination of four elements which is primarily referred to as the 4 P’s namely Products, Place, Prices and promotion that companies modify, in a way so as to generate sales through their own marketing strategies (Armstrong & Kotler 34). It’s a set of tactical marketing tools that firms blend to produce the required response to the target market.
Product: Kotkler and Armstrong define a product as anything that is offered in the market with the intention or generating attention, acquisition and consumption so that it can satisfy a need or want for of a consumer (Armstrong & Kotler 223). Laptops as generated by most technological companies such as Apple Inc., Samsung, Lenovo and Dell are meant to leverage the need for end users for a product that is capable of providing them with computing power to carry out their computational needs in the comfort of their homes and to carry out their jobs and projects more efficiently. Laptops, as envisioned by Abraham, are solutions that give clients and customers the power they need to accomplish their personal or corporate goals such as communication and multimedia.
Place: This Company is headquartered in Alto California and has subsidiaries in Miami, Geneva, Tokyo, and Singapore. In its subsidiaries, the retailer has stores that sell all types of laptops for small businesses, home, and large enterprises use. The company has established end points touching points along its distribution end points where consumers can directly acquire the laptop models they need for their own use in company stores. The company has also established an online store where customers can order their laptops, and they are in turn delivered to their homes or offices.
Price: This Company will fix laptop prices for its customers in a dynamic way where customers will be charged different prices depending on their individual situations and needs. The price will be determined by the measure of utilization they will need for the CPU and memory so that customers pay only for the features and computing capabilities that they require to utilize in their laptop product. The company will put the emphasis more on the benefits that a certain priced laptop product will offer to the customer as compared to another.
Promotion: The Retailer needs to raise its market presence but touting its laptop products as ones that offer the best value to its customers through website advertisement, and using a trade-in program where customers will be required to get a free quote on an eligible old product that is exchanged for a new product. The company will also make used of seasonal and periodic marketing strategies in form of discounts.
Environmental scan
Economic Factors: The global economy is to large extent influencing the growth of PC industry with primary forecasts and reports indicating that small and large corporations are increasing their spending on IT infrastructure and especially the hardware products. In particular, economies of developing countries that include Brazil, China and India are likely to have a faster rate of demand for laptop products. The demand growth in these regions will most likely hit double digit in the coming years.
Social factors: Social factors will influence demand patterns of laptops in different regions such as education, income levels, and individual preferences (Baron 23). This is likely to affect the performance of the company retail stores in each market store it operates. These factors will ultimately affect the brand perception with families with larger incomes likely to afford computers with premium pricing strategies.
Technological: technological advances that have been realized over the past few years such as higher processing powers, reduced costs, reduced power consumption and standardization of windows is the main reason behind the increase of Laptop segment in the market share as compared to other computing devices in the PC industry.
Regulatory factors: in most countries, modern computing devices are now required to be disposed of more according to set government laws that govern how the environment is supposed to be protected. Disposition of used products is now required to be environmentally responsible.
Competitive factors: In the global market, there are now many retailers who deal with laptop devices, some of whom are the manufacturers who open their own stores to sell their own laptops. This poses threats to retailers who do not form strategic partnerships with manufacturers to sell their laptop products in a given territory.
Market Segmentation
The Laptop market is divided in Business and Individual markets. The majority of the corporate and individual clients and customers are most likely be to be found in mature laptop markets which are in North America and Europe. This is because; most households in the region earn higher incomes and consider laptops as an important tool to accomplish their computing goals in their work and education (Kraemer et al. 68). In most of these customer markets, the targeted age brackets are below the age of 50 years because this is the group that is highly trained and rely on laptops to accomplish their business needs.
Ethical Issues
Government regulation and a free market: One of the main concerns in the Laptop industry is the increasing government regulations that are primarily focused on increasing the safety of the products and especially when it comes to product safety during disposition after the end of life of the product. Governments are now increasingly demanding that Laptop retailers need to fix recycling prices during sales point hence this is likely to interfere with how market forces such as demand and supply interact to set the product prices. While there is genuine concern that laptop retailers need to be responsible as players in the Laptop ecosystem, there is also need to give allowance for the retailers to design their own programs that ensure they remain profitable and socially responsible.
Social responsibility
Despite the many additional features such as gaming, enterprise applications and internet access that are offered by modern laptops, retailers marketing and selling laptops will be faced with increasing concerns of health risks that are caused by keeping laptops on the laps for long hours. Placing laptops on the laps for long hours have been found to cause health hazards that are negatively likely to affect the growth of laptop markets. The responsibility of online and physical stores that sell Laptops is to ensure that they educate the public on proper use of Laptops so that they are not exposed to health risks while using laptops.
Global Marketing and the Internet
Recommendation
The best method for a laptop retailer to adopt for the purposes of marketing his business and products is one that takes care of the whole laptop ecosystem. This approach should consider the desires of the customers which include, price consideration, the performance of the laptop and where they can conveniently acquire laptops that fit within their needs (Deng et al. 1200). Laptop retailers also need to be aware that their marketing message needs to respond to the actual concerns of the government on environmental laws and regulations.
Works Cited
Aaker, David A., Vineet Kumar, and George S. Day. Marketing research. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Baron, David P. Business and its Environment. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Deng, Liqiu, Callie W. Babbitt, and Eric D. Williams. "Economic-balance hybrid LCA extended with uncertainty analysis: case study of a laptop computer." Journal of Cleaner Production 19.11 (2011): 1198-1206.
Kotler, Philip, and Gary Armstrong. Principles of marketing. pearson education, 2010.
Kraemer, Kenneth L., Jason Dedrick, and Prakul Sharma. "One laptop per child: vision vs. reality." Communications of the ACM 52.6 (2009): 66-73.
McMahon, Mark, and Romana Pospisil. "Laptops for a digital lifestyle: Millennial students and wireless mobile technologies." Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (2005): 421-431.
