Company’s Branding, Pricing, Segmentation and Distribution Strategy
Company’s Description
The Travelers’ Application is a New-York based online platform designed to give guidance to people who are planning to holiday internationally. This application provides information like weather, potential tourist sites, accommodation information, and directions to and from places of interest. The application is designed to give the traveler insight into what conditions are like in an international location. This application will be extremely useful for people traveling alone and with family. The purpose of this discussion, then, will be to outline a marketing plan for the application, including positioning statement, marketing framework, branding strategy, and marketing strategy.
Branding Strategy
It is known that branding is a complex process of brand development. Branding task is to create a whole image of the company, product or service, to convey its main idea and form a logical and clear communication course. Branding allows solving a wide range of tasks related to the effective promotion of the product or the company, in particular – to form value-added, while making the product more attractive to the end user (Hollensen, 2014).
Branding for this application must be professional and clean, but it must also be engaging and appealing to people of all ages. The interface must focus on functionality and flexibility, especially since the target age for this particular application is so wide (Jobber and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012; Churchill and Iacobucci, 2010). The branding should be clean and simple, while the logo must be memorable – it should test well with audiences of all different ages, and should transfer well onto the mobile platform in case the application becomes primarily mobile at any point. All of these features are incredibly important for the branding strategy moving forward. Once the product’s branding strategy is established, the company must remain consistent and refrain from making too many changes to the brand and logo; this can detract from the purpose of the branding strategy Jobber and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012; Churchill and Iacobucci, 2010).
Pricing Strategy
Despite the fact that the service is of high quality, prices correspond to the prices in the leading travelling agencies in the region. Prices were established after a thorough analysis of all travel agencies’ and applications’ cost for each item. In some cases, the average value was calculated and treated with respect to all such services in order to not repel the customer.
Segmentation Strategy
The client base of Travelers’ Application consists of three target groups, namely wealthy locals, tourists and Americans with technological abilities. These groups are potentially strong consumer segments. The benefits in these segments are that they help to maintain the profitability of the business throughout the year. Focusing on several market segments, Travelers’ Application will not become overly dependent on any single group of consumers.
Differentiation Strategy
Differentiation strategy is the strategy of conquest of competitive advantage, assuming the orientation of the company to provide more value to consumers (except the price) by offering high quality products with a high level of related services justified by the high prices (Czinkota and Ronkainen, 2012). The current competition comes from a number of mobile applications like Airbnb, SkyScanner, Booking, TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet and other travel applications; there are many different kinds of applications that support different aspects of travel, but none that fully integrate support for international travel from the beginning to the end of the trip. However, keys to success of Traveler’s Application include:
Excellent unique service backed by a quality platform;
Traveler’s Application provides with regular entertainment in the evenings and weekends.
Continued aggressive marketing, which concerns positioning of Traveler’s Application as online platform, which offers a high quality and excellent service in a comfortable environment;
Highly qualified and friendly staff;
Multiple streams of income, including gift items, gift cards. In addition to traveling tips, there are booking, information like weather, potential tourist sites, accommodation information, and directions to and from places of interest;
Dynamic website with online sales.
Thus, one of the main differences from other applications will be the use of advertising and marketing in order to ensure a good influx of visitors and the formation of a strong image of its brand. Traveler’s Applciation intends to create immediate consumer awareness, not waiting for a word of mouth. It constructs short time customer traffic via aggressive marketing program. Also, Traveler’s Application offers a wide selection of quality items, including gift items. Business in the gift items may eventually grow and become significant. However, since this is a very complex project, the company did not include it in the financial calculations.
Industry Analysis
Mobile applications development certainly involves a lot of nuances that allow maximum effectiveness to present a particular business project. For example, it is necessary to consider the features and characteristics of particular devices and operating systems. An application can enable, for example, manage accounts in the selected bank, and make purchases on-line and not only. Applications are now actively used in the business environment. It is due to the fact that they are used by millions of potential customers because of their convenience and a wide range of possibilities.
There is stimulating effect on the market by the owners of platforms. Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. stimulate the development of local markets through competitions, creating more favorable conditions for cooperation. The purpose of platform owners is the maximum number of applications to its platform and getting more concurrency service to the user. Large budgets are spent on it, but in the long run it will have fruit. Despite the informatization and computerization of tourism processes and the creation in recent years of mobile guides as applications to travelers, weak saturation of the market should be noted. It is obvious that in the conditions of competition, there is a quality product that meets the requirements of the most modern tourist.
Mobile application created for tablets and smartphones is an innovative tool to stimulate domestic tourism and promotion of investment. The main advantages of mobile applications are simplifying communication between the brand and the user, the economic benefits and ease of use. Depending on the specifics of the company and current business priorities, mobile applications can be an effective marketing tool to attract new customers or convenient service to work with an existing customer base (Laudon and Traver, 2013).
The company will be a follower in the industry, but has the intention to become the leader in the city. When selecting this strategy, the company needs to know the weaknesses of the leader and be able to use these weaknesses to achieve a leading position. The main risk of challenging strategy is that the company, with greatly force competition, may overlook the real needs of the market (Hollensen, 2014).
Social Media Tools
Social networks enable companies to communicate with the users concerned, to build lasting relationships with their customers, build loyalty, manage the company’s reputation, increase sales and solve many other business tasks. Social media allows pointing-to influence a target audience, looking for the site, where the audience is largely represented, and to identify the most appropriate ways of communicating with it (Laudon and Traver, 2013).
Traveler’s Application is a fully functional e-commerce, which can easily become a significant source of income. Through the specialized online platform, the company intends to offer the following services, namely information like weather, potential tourist sites, accommodation information, and directions to and from places of interest. In addition to that, it is the first in the world among tourism applications, which presents on its website directory the works of designers, who participated in the application’s development. It will act as a dealer for a number of designers. Company’s website also contains the following information, namely monthly newsletter, interesting information about the tourism industry, map of company’s institution, special events and other useful data.
Facebook is extremely popular online platform for the promotion of products and services. Social networks of this kind are created primarily for communication purposes; however, it is useful tool for businesses. At present, geolocation social networks such as Foursquare are increasingly popular. Thanks to the geolocation, brands can highlight potential consumers in the context of place and time and more effectively influence consumer preferences. In Foursquare, standard elements of interaction with the audience are the recommendations, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs, discounts and more. In view of the advertised product or service, specificity banner and contextual advertisings are better to place in such networks, where the majority of target audience can be found (Laudon and Traver, 2013).
Thus, it can concluded that social media is an important marketing tool in the meetings’ industry, which is why professionals need to skillfully use the tool of PR-activity. Just due to the integration with social networks, it is possible to display various promotions and contests with Facebook that have a positive effect on sales of tours and users will be more aware of the different shares of the company.
Integrated Marketing Communications
Company’s strong public relations / advertising program uses as its main “hook” these three basic elements:
Traveler’s Application is the first truly exquisite application in New York.
It has a unique service quality.
Company’s difference from all Traveler’s Applications is “the art”.
The purpose of PR / advertising is to reach the awareness of the local market and to establish the brand on a wider scale, to prepare the ground for future expansion. National awareness will help to stimulate the expansion due to the use of the media to make people aware of its brand. This will help pave the way for the future establishment of Traveler’s Application’s brand.
Also, the company will make it an integral part of the local and global community. This will lead to the friendliness of society to Traveler’s Application and will provide an opportunity to establish important contacts with key people. Some of the objectives of public involvement include delivery of some products to local charities to raise funds, sponsoring local youth sports teams and support of fair trade and the use of environmentally friendly products.
Thus, marketing program will enhance the information content, obtaining the necessary traffic and the establishment of brand image by means of social media and integrated marketing communication tools.
References
Churchill, G. A. and Iacobucci, D. (2010). Marketing research: methodological foundations. Boston: South-Western College Pub.
Czinkota, M. R. and Ronkainen, I. A. (2012). International Marketing, 10th ed. Cincinnati: South-Western College Pub.
Hollensen, S. (2014). Marketing Management: A Relationship Approach, 3rd ed. New York: Pearson.
Jobber, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012). Principles and practice of marketing. (No. 7th). McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Laudon, K. C. and Traver, C. (2013). E-Commerce Essentials. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
