Case Write-Up

In the sense of the promotions, Population Services International distributed to both Raja and Maya $400,000 advertising dollars per year, which was the second largest of all advertisers In Bangladesh. Their approach was to skip the Intermediate level of Influences and go directly to consumers. In this case, It works to sell Raja condoms directly to the market since It’s more like a one-time use consumer products. However, it’ll be difficult for Maya to build up the brand image since customers perceived Maya as a drug, which will bring more concerns when people try to buy oral contraceptives.

Hence, it still needs recommendations from doctors to convey the effectiveness and proper information about the drug. Third, the pricing of Raja and Maya can also be an influence to their performance when compared to their competitors’ price. For example, Raja is priced more than competitor Tahiti, which is government sponsored condom manufacturer. The higher price of Raja made a premium image for customers to buy the condoms even If the price is higher. On the other hand, however, Maya is priced lower than its competitors, creating a hurting image that for oral medicines, cheaper may mean bad laity.

And this situation got worse when it didn’t get the recommendations from intermediate level influences. Finally, the distributions for both products were to focus directly to customers. So SSI planned to sell their products via pharmacies, general stores, and pan stores. Nevertheless, the difference in nature of these two products caused deferent performance. For Raja, it’s easily to sell their products since men accounted for 80% of the purchasing behaviors of the birth control products.

But it became difficult for Maya to have the same efficiency since people till prefer to see a doctors before decide which medicine is safe and reliable, which Is the critical cause for the sluggish sales of Maya. 2) How do you characterize the competitive environment in Bangladesh? That Is, when you look at SSI vs.. The other organizations In the space, how do they view each other? How does this differ from the other for-profit contexts we’ve studied? What might It mean for the strategy? ) Create a marketing plan for Improving sales of Maya Given the analysis that I described before, It Is the difference In nature that causes the difficulty to sell Maya successfully. In order to create a marketing plan for improvement, we need to modify the flaws in the previous one. To begin with I’ll suggest to create a new brand. To explain, it’s already been perceived by Bangladesh that Maya is a brand that is cheap and mistakenly regarded as an inferior product. Reputation, competing with their main competitors, which are the government sectors and Vast.

So my recommendation for the price would be to price their oral contraceptives the same price around their competitors, getting rid of the inferior image of the product. Also, Its important to target their customers not only for males but males as well. The reason for this is because for the buying behaviors of the birth control products, 80% of the purchases were made by men. As a result. They can put more effort to their advertising to educate male customers the effectiveness of their products.

Finally, to achieve SKI’S goal, which is to broaden their market share to help control Bangladesh population explosion, they’ll need to increase their profit margin to retailers and RPM (Rural Medical Practitioners) in order for them to promote more diligently to the end customers to increase the overall market share. To explain, the profit for retailers now are low due to the low pricing of the Maya. So increasing the price of the product will enable SSI to provide higher profit margin to retailers, incentives them to put more selling effort to sell out new product.

For Ramps, they can be critical since they are the one that can reach out to distant area and provide their recommendations to consumers. So including the intermediate level of influences will bring a better communication and education to customers, enabling a better brand perception and awareness of the new products. By providing more profit incentives to RPM, we’ll be able to achieve this goal. 4) How will you evaluate your plan? How can you calculate the ROI? The “l” is relatively straightforward but how would you go about evaluating the “R? What challenges do you face in this regard as compared with most of the other cases we’ve discussed? How would you address it? In order for the plan to be feasible, we’ll need to take into account multiple data and information from the current selling circumstance of Maya to make a thorough evaluation. To begin with, I’ll conduct surveys to see how people perceive the Brand of Maya to make sure that the issue of he produce is the cheap quality and also to see the why customers are unwilling to try out Maya.

Moreover, the COPY (Couple Years Protection) for industry and SMS (The Social Marketing Project) products from Exhibit 8 is an indicator for us to observe the change of market share and growth rate from 1978 to 1983. And based on the change throughout the years, we can further conclude whether the approach for Maya had problem that need to be addressed. Finally, I’ll try to get the distribution data from retailer, wholesaler, and smallholder to see how they sell their products in terms f the sales ranking of the products in the same category.

Therefore, by using the data mentioned, we can reconstruct a new marketing plan for the new product and focus more on the culture of Bangladesh in terms of selling birth control products. Given our plan can be successfully implemented, we need to figure the challenge in the long run. And since the project is lunched by a not-for-profit agency, they mainly relied on funding to support their operation. According to the case, the barely earn profit by this product since the profit margin for the product is very low. Challenge, use project, longer no fund