Executive Summary
Marketing communications is one of the vital initiatives that account for the success of brands in market penetration and market expansion. This technique implies the use of communications theories as a guide of the activities and considerations in strategic marketing communications. Compiled herein is a report on the communications campaign plan for Company A’s proposed Fresh Alive Juice brand in the United Kingdom fresh juice market. The report borrows from the insights into the market situation to determine the target consumer segments, the communications theories to apply and the actual marketing campaign that befits the case of Fresh Alive Juices for marketing of the new fresh organic juice products that intends to establish a sense of differentiation for a competitive advantage in the market. Based on the applied theories and tactics, the television and radio advertisement, as well as the harnessing of celebrity endorsement programs on social media, act complementarily toward enhancing the competitive positioning of Fresh Alive Juice as a brand in the UK fresh juice market. The ultimate goal of the proposed campaign plan is to assure the successful market penetration and attainment of the desirable market performance results for the Fresh Alive Juices brand. This leads to the finding that advertisement across the one-way interactive communications channels (television and radio) as well as the two-way interactive communications platforms (YouTube and Instagram), which can valuably accommodate an effective celebrity endorsement initiative – can together lure sterling market performance and differentiated competitive positioning for the Fresh Alive Juices brand.
Campaign Context
Market Analysis
The market situation is a vital aspect to consider when it comes to market analysis. This implies the impacts macro-environmental and micro-environmental factors have on the operations of Company A toward the newly launched fresh organic juice. This section is based on the market insights into the vital elements of marketing for the fresh juice brand and its competitive positioning in the United Kingdom market. Aspects of market analysis that matter to this section are market size and features, the landscape of competition, and the significantly impactful socio-cultural factors. Technically, market analysis results are key to guiding the relevant considerations that can make an effective communications plan (Cravens and Piercy, 2006). This explains the uppermost priority for an understanding of the market situation and the resultant implications for Company A’s imminent juice brand.
Market Size and Features
According to Statista (2021), the United Kingdom fresh juice sector shows a significantly prolific contribution to the economic state. The industry registered a fluctuating trend of slight drops and increases in the returns for the operational period between 2014 and 2020 (Statista, 2021). Furthermore, the market is characterised by about 78 conspicuous role-players with an approximate industrial value of £513 million (Ibis World, 2021). The industry also provides more than 2,300 employment opportunities in the United Kingdom (Ibis World, 2021). These industrial performance indicators justify the venture into launching the fresh organic juice brand for the competitiveness of Company A in the fresh juice industry of the UK.
Socio-Cultural Factors
The industry can be briefly described as reliant on consumption trends, which are further determined by the external and internal environmental factors that are likely to affect Company A’s fresh organic juice brand’s positioning and market performance. One of the vital factors that are attributable to the growing adoption and performance of the industry in the UK is the increasing popularity and preference rate for the healthy blends of fresh juice (Gittelsohn et al., 2017). This implies that Company needs to prioritise the optimal positioning of the fresh organic juice, which will be marketed under the proposed brand name – Fresh Alive Juice. These consumption trends are key to defining the extant customer needs and expectations from a premium brand of organic juice products under the apple, blackberry, and pear flavours.
Competition Landscape
The fresh juices industry in the United Kingdom is intensely competitive. This implies that brands such as the proposed Fresh Alive Juice for Company A have to differentiate to suitably survive the rivalry in the fresh juice market across the United Kingdom. Some of the top-performing brands in the UK fresh juice industry are Orchard House Foods, Konings Juices & Drinks UK, and PepsiCo International (Ibis World, 2021). Undoubtedly, the increasing sense of health-conscious consumption of food and beverages as in the industry promises good prospects for the newly proposed Fresh Alive Juice brand to have its products popularly impactful in the market upon differentiated positioning (Ziauddeen et al., 2018). To optimally address these consumer insights, Fresh Alive Juice has to develop agile and dependable ways of addressing the needs and expectations.
Market Gap
Even though the fresh juice industry in the United Kingdom has been associated with active role-players, the idea of quenching the needs and expectations of healthy eating customers remains limited. A majority of the companies in the market provide a variety of products that portray an imbalance between the use of the right ingredients for a healthy-eating lifestyle and the quality of the final fresh juice products (Ziauddeen et al., 2018). This means Fresh Alive Juice can seek a differentiated positioning by extending the provision of the fresh juices to purely organic and fresh with the customisable blackberry, pear, and apple flavours.
Target Consumers
Table 1 – Consumer profile for the Fresh Alive Juice brand of fresh organic juices
Visual Presentation of Typical Target Consumer
From Table 1, the target segment for Fresh Alive Juice products can be demographically described as male and female consumers of fresh juice aged between 25 and 45 years. This segment is arguably the most valuable based on the assumptions that it encompass mostly the family members and working class in the United Kingdom (Testa et al., 2019). These targeting considerations add value to the socio-cultural aspects that determine if and when the target customers can purchase from Fresh Alive Juice.
Brand Positioning
The proposed fresh organic juice brand for Company A is Fresh Alive Juice. By addressing the need for customised beverage drinks per the customers’ needs when it comes to access to healthy eating options that further guarantee value for the exorbitant price. The value of the juice drinks will be encoded in the product designing process to produce top-quality and purely fresh juices that are made from strictly squeezed organic ingredients. Flavours such as pear, apple, and blackberry are purposely presented as options to befit the customers’ consumer needs. The uniqueness of the consumer experience for the Fresh Alive Juice products extends to assurance of sustainable consumption owing to the corporate alignment of operational strategies with sustainable development in the fresh organic beverages sector.
Indubitably, Company A’s market offerings under the Fresh Alive Juice brand name strive to address the needs and expectations of the consumers. By catering to purely organic ingredients, the high level of freshness, and consideration of the sustainable development theories to enable a sense of sustainability in production and consumption (Cravens and Piercy, 2006). Through these strategic considerations, Company A has good prospects in attaining competitive positioning of the Fresh Alive Juice brand of fresh and organic juices that involve pear, apple, and blackberry flavours.
The brand name – Fresh Alive Juice – summarily communicates about the specifications of the market offerings that Company A has for its targeted customers. The word ‘Fresh’ represents the pure nature of the ingredients that are used to make the juice products. This implies the use of naturally-grown fruits that are blended into squeezed fresh juices with a hint of agility and being served in 250 mL to encourage the ‘on the go’ consumption behaviour. ‘Alive’ in the brand name caters to the natural nurturing and preservation of the fresh juice ingredients, especially fruits while the word ‘Juice’ is included in the brand name to stress the type of products the brand deals with. The brand name is tactically proposed in light of the Integrated Content Marketing (ICM) to play multiple roles as a communication enhancer about the particular products as well as their unique nature, in a value-creating manner that not only limits expenses but also enables the effective relaying of marketing messages to target audiences.
Campaign Objectives
The following two (2) objectives make up the motives of the communications campaign that is proposed to befit Fresh Alive Juice brand of fresh organic juice products from Company A. These objectives are:
- To attract a larger size (40%) of the North East England fresh juice market share, which is measurable by the number of customers for three operational months (1st April to 1st July 2022).
- To enable the achievement of the better market performance results for Company A’s Fresh Alive Juice brand of fresh organic juice products as determinable from the returns on sales for three operational months (1st April to 1st July 2022).
Communications Theory and Justification of the Campaign
The characteristic feature of the communications plan that befits the case of Company A’s Fresh Alive Juice is focusing on effective communication with the target audiences. This is because as shown in Table 1, the products tend to match with the consumption needs of a wider niche in the market. This segment includes both genders (male and female) as well as a wide range of age-based groupings. However, the unique aspect of the market segment is psychographic, which limits the audience to the positive embracers of healthy eating lifestyles and exemplary advocates of sustainable development in production and consumption.
The theories of communications are vital when planning for a promotional campaign. This is because the theoretical frameworks help understand the influence and practical use of communications approaches (Eagle et al., 2020). As this section of the report elaborates, the campaign for Fresh Alive Juice will be well-aligned with a set of relevant theories that guide the inferences per exploration of opportunities in the market.
Strong Theories – The Hierarchy of Effects Model
According to Wijaya (2015), the hierarchy of effects model is a well-defined theory of information processing. The model leads to an inference that the influential aspects of information processing tend to reflect an orderly unfolding of how the information in marketing messages can be processed by the target audiences. Technically, the hierarchical sense of the model reveals that the steps followed in information processing include awareness creation, knowledge acquisition, the development of a sense of liking, preferences, conviction, and purchasing (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961; Berry et al., 2018). These steps guide the formulation of the marketing campaign for effective communication to reach out to the potential customers of the Fresh Alive Juice brand from Company A.
Two-Step Model (Influencer Model)
Theoretically, Fresh Alive Juice’s products can be marketed through the adoption of the two-step model, which is also known as the influencer model (IM). Through this model, influential reaching out to the markets can be enabled by synchronising the impact of opinion leaders and the outcome of the individual social contact with the influencers (Xiao et al., 2018). Celebrity endorsement is founded on the influencer model whereby a popular celebrity can be engaged via a marketing communications initiative. The whole idea behind the use of celebrity endorsement lies in the justification per the source credibility theory. Such that, the ability the celebrities can have in terms of influencing a brand and the market offerings lies in their personalities and how trustable they can be while conveying a marketing message that is in advocacy of the brand involved in the endorsement program (Xiao et al., 2018). The influencer model acts as a guide for Fresh Alive Juice’s marketing campaign in the United Kingdom fresh juice market.
The Selected Media
Television and Radion Channels in the United Kingdom
The selected media channels for the advertising campaign include the television and radio stations that are popular in the UK. As guided by Domazet et al. (2017), spreading marketing messages from television and radio implies a high probability of reaching out to the members of the general public in entirety. This consideration is geared toward optimising the ability to reach out and convince the potential consumers of the fresh organic juice products from Fresh Alive Juice. Technically, the use of television and radio stations tends to complement the harnessing of the hierarchy of effects model. Simply, airing the advert during the prime news hours and commercial breaks in the famous programs promises to ensure the effective reaching out to a larger assortment of the target customers (Domazet et al., 2017). It is also a tactical approach to maximising value amid advertisement campaigns on radio and T.V for Fresh Alive Juice’s competitive positioning in the market. Notably, the radio and T.V ads make up the one-way communications in a linear and limited technique of conveying information.
Social Media
As Chen and Lin (2019) infer, social media marketing is an exponentially growing strategic initiative for marketing communications. Its high degree of affinity relates to the high degree of convenience that is triggered by online communications techniques. Simply, internet-based communications platforms manifest the increasing trend in terms of adoption owing to their assured convenience and agility in spreading information from the source to audiences (Shaltoni, 2017). Sharing is also highly convenient and easy across virtual platforms such as social media platforms.
Also, celebrity endorsement is a befitting influencer marketing approach for brands such as Fresh Alive Juice. This is because administering celebrity endorsement on social media guarantees brands’ access to the influenced audiences to levels of developing healthy relationships based on the emotional link between the brand and the consumers (Chen and Lin, 2019). For this reason, Fresh Alive Juice will run a celebrity endorsement initiative in the United Kingdom across social media platforms – particularly two-way interactive online platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The aspect of feedbacks from these two-way interactive communications platforms makes it fitter for running celebrity endorsement initiatives to trigger effective customer engagement.
The Marketing Campaign
This section represents the visual aspect of the marketing communications plan for the market advocacy of Fresh Alive Juice products for the apple, pear, and blackberry flavours. Table 2 shows the Gantt Chart for the operational activities that are stipulated to run for three months (from 1st April 2022 to 1st July 2022). Table 3 further elaborates on the budgeting and budget control over the 3-months campaigning period for effective use of the £100,000 while targeting the North East England market. Table 4 shows the visual idea behind the campaign.
Table 2: Gantt Chart for the Fresh Alive Juice Campaign Plan
Table 3: Budget for the Fresh Alive Juice Campaign Plan
Table 4: Visuals of the integrated marketing campaign
Evaluation and Monitoring
Evaluation and monitoring remain a great blend that makes the uppermost approach to risk management. It is through the routine assessments of the campaign plan that Fresh Alive Juice can identify the faults in the communications plan. Technically, the impact of the communications efforts will be centrally positioned when it comes to the vetting of the credibility level of the campaign plan.
For social media marketing and celebrity endorsement-based engagement, Company A can discern if the communication plan is effective or not. This is assessable through the performance metrics such as the number of clicks, views of the reaching out contents, number of followers to the brand’s official profiles and the number and nature of comment reactions from the audiences to the marketing messages and different contents like the social media postings (Chen and Lin, 2019). As for the one-way interactive communications approaches such as television and radio advertisement, the Fresh Alive Juice brand can be assessed for market performance as a result of the communication campaign based on the returns on sales. The differentials in the market share would thus directly imply the state of the campaign (Tuten, 2020). The findings of these performance assessment tools are expected to be insightful per the right improvements to introduce to guarantee effective marketing communications for the Fresh Alive Juice products.
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