About Gillette: The Company was established in 1901 by Ruler C. Gillette in Boston. It introduced its first razor in 1903. By 1905 Gillette started its international expansion by starting companies in London and Paris. It presented its first shaving cream in 1936 and first electric razor in 1938. The World Warfare I and II benefited Gillette tremendously. All its items were consumed by defence pushes. Gillette then moved on growth journey by acquiring companies. It attained Braun AG in 1967, a little appliance maker. In 1984 it acquired Oral-B providing a thrust to brand. By this time Gillette was diversified in business and was employed in 5 different sectors. In the past due 1990s scheduled to Asian money crisis Gillette profitability shrunk with company absent all its revenue guidelines. Currently Gillette is comprised of 3 communities: Global Business management group, Commercial operations (Eastern and American). The first group deals with R&D and developing of most products. The other two teams cope with sales and marketing across the world.
Product Information: Gillette is a market innovator in shaving gels market. "Gillette Series" is a assortment of shaving gels and foams sold as you sub-brand. Gillette series has 6 different gels for sale under it. Gillette Series Sensitive Pores and skin shaving gel is the most dominant product in this range. Each one of these gels variations are in the high quality segment. Sensitive pores and skin shaving gel is the basic level gel from Gillette.
The Gillette Series Sensitive Epidermis shaving gel has been developed as a technologically-advanced personal health care product for men. It has been developed for men whose skins are sensitive or sensitive to razor's action. They avoid shaving as it leaves their pores and skin using and with a whole lot of slashes and rashes.
The gel is intended to make shaving easy for them by virtue of its triple protective formula.
It has aloe in it plus some mild fragrance.
High level lubricants, including Glycerin and Silica, hydrate to enhance razor gliding and deliver a comfortable shave.
Its anti-friction technology will save you from slices and burning sensation.
Gillette shaving gels' presentation is done tastefully. It attracts customers and conveys the feeling of an excellent product inside. Gillette markets sensitive shaving gel in pipes and canisters. The shelf life of canisters is more, they keep more volume, are easy to carry, plus they cost more too.
Target Market
Gillette's product range caters to men's personal grooming market. Their shaving gel products are meant for men who attach importance to personal grooming and skin area maintenance. This customer section is willing to pay high quality price for good products that are meant for personal grooming.
Market Segmentation: The market for shaving product is a competitive one. So within the forex market Gillette must identify the sections and promote very sensitive shaving gel to them. These sections can be selected on the basis demographics i. e. executives, young working men, and young adults. These users want quality products for convenience and better shave. The behaviouristic segmentation may be used to aim for people who shave regularly. Psychographics segmentation can help identify appearance conscious, socializing men as another potential segment.
Target Market: The target market for Gillette Series Private shaving gel is divided in to two categories. First category is the urban, modern, appearance mindful male human population in this band of 20-45 years. Men with delicate skins are special target area of the product development team. The name of the merchandise highlights the merchandise specialization to this category of customers. Gillette Series Sensitive Shaving gel focuses on the customer by highlighting the merchandise capacities of providing a clean shave without nicks and inflammation. In addition, it provides appealing appear and feel to the packaging of its shaving gel. This also attracts teenagers.
Second category is shaving cream and foam users. Since this is the basic level shaving gel from Gillette, so by charges it competitively Gillette also endeavors to fully capture the shaving cream users' market to enticing them to go to gel. In the advertisements they have tried to point out the benefits of gel over cream and foam to increase its market bottom. Due to this lots of men have now shifted to gel completely.
Positioning: Gillette has always helped bring new products to cater to various market segments instead of changing a specific shaving gel repeatedly. Gillette's strength is based on the superior quality of their shaving gels. It promotes each shaving gel as a definite product to the client. They utilize this technique to position each shaving gel at different podium in the market. This smart setting strategy helps them cover the width of market and become a market innovator.
Product Strategy
Gillette has been credited as a pioneer in shaving products. Over time it has brought superior products which have ushered new avenues in the shaving market. At the core of Gillette's product strategy and development rests the idea of staying ahead in your competition. They achieve this by introducing several products to capture the width of market while also keeping scientific superiority. Gillette has 700 million faithful customers in 200 countries around the world.
Gillette Series exclusively has 6 types shaving gels under its brand. There are a few other gels too that Gillette sells however, not under Gillette series. The product strategy of having products at all the positions definitely assist in capturing market talk about. Gillette Series has been acknowledged with producing Shaving gel with Aloe in it. It also has products that are rich in Supplement E to help your skin fitness or products that are 100 % pure and natural with no scent or harmful chemicals in it.
Gillette depends on Shaving Gels focused product strategy because:
They provide better lubrication than lotions.
The minerals and vitamins, e. g. vitamin supplements E or aloe, are easy to combine in gels rather than ointments or foams. In addition, it helps in retaining their natural semi liquid state.
Product Levels: Kotler experienced suggested three product levels. Each product is seen through these levels. Each one of these levels enhances the value proposition to the merchandise. The Gillette case is mapped and discussed in the light of the.
Augmented: Superior technology of Gillette products and stability of the brand
Core product: would be quality of lubrication and simple shave
Actual: High lubrication shaving gel for delicate skin
Packaging Design
Product classification: Gillette sensitive shaving gel fulfills the characteristics of convenience goods such as
They are purchased frequently with minimal effort.
Buying is on a normal basis
There are multiple purchase locations for the product.
Packaging and Labelling: Gels can be purchased in pressurised canisters as it reduces spill chances and provides easy portability. It really is more very important to technical reasons alternatively than appealing to customers. Labelling is important for something associated with quality such as Gillette hypersensitive shaving gel. So Gillette's users might not be influenced by product packaging much but labelling would assure them about the genuineness and information on a products.
Pricing Strategy
At the intro of a new product in the market any organization must find out at what price it will launch the product. The price is one factor of source costs, demand, competition, do it yourself perception, and companies' strategy of product positioning. The costing strategy also needs to are the price and quality strategy matrix as suggested by Philip Kotler.
Philip Kotler determined 9 price quality strategies
High Price Low Price
High Quality
Low Quality
Premium
High Value
Super Value
Over Charging
Mid Value
Good Value
Rip-Off
False Economy
Economy
There are three types of pricing objectives and achieve these goals there will vary strategies namely
Profit Oriented
Profit maximization
Satisfactory Profits
Target come back on investment
Sales Oriented
Market share
Sales maximization
Status Quo
Match competitor's price
Maintain same price
Gillette uses these nine price quality goals to set prices for its products. It prices strategy is also governed by the charges goals and the positioning it wants because of its product. For technologically advanced and services it uses advanced prices. For products meant to capture market talk about it uses average costs. Thus it practices different pricing targets for different offerings and it is true for most of its product range e. g. for Gillette Hydra gel it is using income focused objective with Focus on ROI as strategy.
For the merchandise under review i. e. Gillette series hypersensitive skin area shaving gel the rates objective used by Gillette is Sales Focused and the strategy to achieve this goal is Market talk about. This is the entry level shaving gel from Gillette but quality wise it focuses on the broadest customer segment. Most men complain of skin area irritability after shave and this one promises to ease this issue. The pricing-quality mixture also helps in winning new entrants as customers.
Gillette sensitive shaving gel Price/Quality
High Price
Gillette Fusion Hydra Gel
Nivea Private Shave gel
L'oreal Anti Irritability gel
Gillette Sensitive Skin shave gel
High Quality
Low Quality
Low Price
On the above mentioned map a comparison of varied products offered in the delicate skin area shaving gels range has been done. They are likened on the dimensions of price and quality. It can be seen that the Gillette series delicate shaving gel is a value offering as its least expensive among the list of group while on the quality dimension is very near to L'oreal and Nivea's offering. The high sales level of Gillette's hypersensitive shaving gel clearly indicates that it's considered a good value for the money by customers. The Gillette's own hydra gel is priciest and best value product in the market.
Clinique M Shave Aloe Gel
High Price
Gillette hypersensitive shaving gel Price/Attribute
L'oreal Anti Irritation gel
Gillette sensitive shave gel
High Point of Purchase (Company owned or operated Stores, neighbourhood stores, multi brand retails)
Low Point of Purchase (Company possessed Stores)
Low Price
Gillette's primary target market is busy professionals in urban locations. They prefer easy option of the products. In the above map we can easily see the Clinique's shave gel isn't just expensive but barely available too. This sort of pricing-availability style can rarely achieve big market cover. On the contrary Gillette is the most easily available shaving gel. Gillette's main customer Walmart is the world's biggest retailer and it offers wide contact with the merchandise. Besides that this product can be found with ease in neighbourhood stores too. L'oreal is expensive than Gillette and not as easily available.
Promotion Strategy
The promotional strategy takes a business to strategise how it designs to attain and talk to the target market segments. Campaigns are only conveying your information about the merchandise. A business must outline what's great about any of it communications and what isn't.
As part of promotional strategy Gillette has world's leading sports athletes promoting its products. Sports athletes are inspirational characters. A lot of individuals aspire to end up like them. The strategy is to sxxconvey to audience that successful, healthy and beautiful people uses Gillette products. Another aspect of this strategy is that the sports athletes that Gillette has hired are from different sports. This gains relevance in the wake of the fact that Gillette is a global brand and in different countries different athletics' heroes are revered. For instance in India they have Rahul Dravid as brand ambassador while in Australia they have got Michael Clarke. For European countries they have got Roger Federer. Thus giving width with their promotional schemes market.
As part of Gillette's promotional strategy they use the following tools to keep reminding customers with their services.
Direct Marketing: They run adverts on television offering leading runners promoting their shaving products. Gillette's website is very customer friendly. It hosts a great deal of videos about how to make use of their products besides highlighting the advantages of features in them. It major advantages are deep penetration and vast audience base. The prospective market for Gillette is world wide web savvy population so it is easy to reach them and get their feedbacks.
Advertisements: Gillette uses men's magazines to market their offerings. The main element good thing about this that the target market's fashion conscious segment can see the product's offerings and features.
Sales Campaign: Gillette usually operates sales promotion schemes all the year. At times they provide bundled products at savings or extra gel per canister or free promotional products to popularize new products. The main benefit of this strategy is that the young customers' bottom part seems good as they have more for the same amount. For new products it gives customers an opportunity to experience new technology shaving goods cost free which later helps them to make up to date buying decisions.
Public Relations: Gillette's PR initiatives are an important pillar of its promotional strategy. It really is conscious of its public image and reputation. Within its PR it removed PADRAIG HARRINGTON as brand ambassador when his extra marital affairs' reports broke out. Gillette had to pay heavily in case it made a decision to prematurely leave the contract with the golfer. It still proceeded to go ahead and terminated the deal. This was an essential decision on Gillette's part as it decided to stand by the ethnic ethos of its customers and their families.
Market Mix
Product
Gillette Series very sensitive shave gel is meant to target a fresh segment. It has to demonstrate what is being promoted. The excess features like calming affect need to be there to satisfy the basic need of the consumer. The very sensitive shave gel should have anti inflammatory property, light perfume and antiseptic properties. The very sensitive shaving gels market is new which will be Gillette first business in this field. The customers' targets in this area are different from reduced segment's customer. The product is intended to attain a larger, price conscious, vacillating segment of the market. Gillette so far has done little if any customization. For the Gillette very sensitive shave gel, this strategy would not work well and it requires to understand the way of thinking of the target market.
Pricing
Gillette should choose Value based prices strategy. It is because the shaving gel is an extremely competitive market with a whole lot of cheap local imitation challenging Gillette. Value based Pricing can help get more customers by offering a quality product at an acceptable price. It doesn't mean in any way that less prices will generate more sales. It is about developing and developing the merchandise with an attempt to keep costs in order while maintaining the quality. Localization of development assists with attaining this. Gillette did this in razor market also.
Place
Gillette biggest customer is Walmart. This much dependency on a single customer is not good for business. Gillette should diversify the selling channels. It will use online sales activities. The mark market for Gillette very sensitive shave gel is young, informed people. They spend lots of time online and like to look from the comfort of home. Gillette should allow visitors to buy online or order online and get delivery at home or a near by store. Besides it is easy to educate them about the product when they are shopping on the internet. The merchandise type is not having any bearing of size, materials as in case there is shoes and clothes. This helps it be an ideal item for online buying.
Promotion
To promote delicate shave gel Gillette should use promotional videos on youtube detailing the advantages of the merchandise, provide fashion salons promotional packs in order to let customers test drive it, should setup kiosks to provide customers free samples. These will cause product understanding in goal customers. Gillette ambassadors should be engaged in promoting very sensitive shave gel up to they do for the razors. Educating the prospective market about the merchandise is the core area that needs to be covered. Direct marketing and sales campaign are best suited for newly launched products.
