Clique Pens Analysis Essay

Currently multitude pens is stuck in a situation where they ar competing with other pen distinguishs including BIC, Scripto, Pentel, Pilot, Papermate, and Sharpie. The fight for shelf length is among some of the biggest retailers planetary such as Wal-Mart, Target, CVS, and Kroger. Because of the immense power retailers pretend in this market, companies analogous Clique need to make sure they are allocating their funds in ways that deem appropriate to stay on the shelves. Pens are a high profit and high-turnover items which for retailers is great, but because retailers havent changed the price for around over a decade, manufacturers are receiving less and less profit from their items. Retailers hold the power over the manufacturers in this market due to the amount of brands uncommitted if one brand wasnt working for the retailer, they could simply conduct some other brand. In ensnare to remain profitable Cliques brand managers have worked with different marketing and ad agencies to develop an integrated software product of advertising, trade and consumer promotions to maintain the market share.Clique allocated 15% of its total promotional budget to advertising, 30% to consumer promotions, and 55% to trade promotions. Types of advertising Clique apply consumer promotions and price off deals through the retailer, in such ways you would collide with in an ad in a magazine, available at tush. Consumer promotions were mostly used as coupons distributed to the customer through newspapers, in-store displays, and cash immortalise receipts. Coupon redemption rate deemed useless for the most part considering rates were about 1.3% lower than most other consumer products. Elise Ferguson (president of the writing implements division of U.S. home) has a very important decision to make whether or not the ships company should spend their time and gold marketing towards retailers or towards consumers, in order to grow Cliques profits.One option that the com pany could choose to go with would be marketing towards the consumers rather than the retailers. Logan Chen, vice president of marketing feels that reducing trade discounts and establishing a consumer oriented MDF (Market Development Funds), coupled with superfluous consumer-targeted marketing programs is the way to ensure that consumers are receiving the full benefit of Cliques promotional dollars. However, Ross McMillan, sales vice president disagrees on that signifier of action whole heartedly.If Clique were to use a majority of their sales and marketing funds towards the consumer the company couldlose considerable shelf space and sales to competitors, due to the reduced marketing controlled funds. Consumers in this market overly do not hold much if any brand loyalty, which heart they wouldnt pay much mind to advertising. Another large portion to keep in mind would be the fact that coupon redemption rates are 1.4% lower than other consumer products, which means wasting mone y that was spent on this type of advertising. Going with this option would be super costly for Clique as well as a knockout move in the already fragile market one revile move towards the retailers and Clique could kiss their shelf space goodbye.