Chapter Three: The Marketing Environment
Vignette: In Chapter Three you read about Labatt's marketing strategies. Promotion is aimed at specific target groups and considers demographic factors affecting the beer market.
Featured URL:http://www.labatt.com
Consumer Power - Let's Drink to That
Collecting and evaluating information helps companies like those in the beer and wine industry identify market opportunities and threats. This is important as it relates to external environments and what can be controlled that impacts on marketing. Social, demographic, economic, technological, political, legal and competitive factors need to be considered when making marketing plans.
In preparation for this web exercise, please review the materials that cover demographic data found for the various groups that make up our society here in Canada, in particular, Generation X, Baby Boomers and Older Consumers.
Activity
1. Create three profiles. Each will represent a person who could be a member of one of each of the three groups - Generation X, Baby Boomers and Older Consumers. To make this exercise more believable, give each of the three persons a name, sex, age, education, ethnic origin, language, career, family, life style, interests, etc.
2. Visiting the sites given in the Resource section for beer and wine, make a case for which beverage your imagined characters would prefer. Explain why you believe each person would be most likely to enjoy beer or wine.
3. Come up with a strategy you think might appeal to each character most if you were targeting them to buy the other product. That is, if you think they would most likely buy beer, what campaign might you conduct in order to get them to try wine or if they would most likely buy wine, how would you get them interested in buying beer.
Resources
Beer
http://www.interbrew.com - This
site is an information site for breweries including Labatts.
http://realbeer.com/canada/
- Real Beer's Canadian Beer Index
http://www.canbeer.com/ - Canadian
Beer Review - an old site no longer updated but archives materials
that is still relevant to the beer industry.
http://members.home.net/douglas.j.steele/BreweryLinks.html
- A beer fan's homage to Canadian beer
http://www.beer.com/ca/index.html
- an entertainment site targeting beer drinkers
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/gi11311e.html
- Industry Canada's Guide to Brewery Products
Wine
http://www.fas.usda.gov/info/agexporter/1999/uncorkin.html
- an article , "Uncorking Canadian Wine Imports"
By Kathleen Wainio
http://www.canwine.com/ - The
Canadian Wine Home Page listing wineries by province
http://www.vancouver-island-bc.com/canadianwines/
- Canadian Wineries, Vineyards and Wine Regions
http://www.worldwine.com/Canada.htm
- Canadian Wine Directory
http://www.winesofcanada.com/
- Wines of Canada with health, restaurant and cooking information
http://www.wineroute.com/flash.htm
- a tour through Ontario wine country
http://www.thewineman.com/VQACanada.htm
- Wine news and information by Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) of Canada
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/gi11411e.html
- Industry Canada's Guide to wine
Specific Brands of Wine
http://www.bluemountainwinery.com/index2.htm
- Blue Mountain Winery
http://www.missionhillwinery.com/missionhillwinery/
- Mission Hill WInery
http://www.peleeisland.com/
- Pelee Island Winery
http://www.sumacridge.com/
- Sumac Ridge Winery
http://www.andreswines.com/
- Andre's Winery
Instructors: Optional Activities
As with all of the Web exercises, the exercise for Chapter Three can be used as suggested or certain parts can be adapted to better suit your student population. You will want to estimate how much time is required to complete any part or all of the parts. It will be helpful to give students a suggested time frame for completing their assignments. It will also help to determine how much credit might be given for the assignment.
The initial activity for Chapter Three gives students an opportunity to clarify ideas about demographic characteristics as related to consumer buying behaviour and as it may predict how that specific market group might respond to a specific marketing mix.
This exercise can be developed individually by students and handed in as a research assignment or it might be the starting point for a term project done in small groups of three with each student in the group taking one of the characters. The following are ideas for taking the exercise in more detailed directions for a greater number of points.
1. Character Development
Students are divided into small groups with each member of the group developing an individual character as suggested above. Each character is described and illustrations can be developed with pictures from magazines or graphics found on the web or in clip art. Each character will have a choice of either wine or beer as their preferred beverage.
2. Role Play
Students acting as marketers can, based on their research concerning the characters developed, come up with a marketing campaign designed to convince characters to try a different beverage. Role play can be done to act out any scenarios that could inform these choices - for example, conducting a beer tasting party or taking someone on a tour of a winery.
3. Marketing Campaign
Choosing either one of the beers that is described on one of the beer web sites and using any research information given there, students will create a specific campaign targeting that particular product towards one or more of the characters developed who prefers wine.
4. Contrasting Strategies
Choosing one or more of the Canadian winery sites for comparison, locate
wineries in the United States, South America or Europe and contrast their
marketing strategies with those of a Canadian winery.