Mother Care Plc

Table of Content

INTRODUCTION1

DISCUSSION1

TARGET MARKET1

CUSTOMER NEEDS1

COMPETITION2

KEY COMPETITIVE CAPABILITIES2

KEY COMPETITIVE WEAKNESSES3

MARKETING OBJECTIVES3

MARKETING STRATEGIES4

STRENGTHS4

WEAKNESS4

OPPORTUNITIES5

THREATS5

MARKETING MIX5

EXTERNAL BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT5

INTERNATIONAL ADVERTISING STRATEGY5

INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY6

MARKET ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS SUMMARY6

TARGET MARKET SEGMENT STRATEGY7

EXIT STRATEGY7

CONCLUSION8

Mother Care Plc

INTRODUCTION

Mothercare is mum-and-kid friendly. The baby care retailer sells maternity, baby, and children's clothes; nursery equipment; and toys from more than 980 company owned and franchised stores, more than 700 of which are outside the UK. Mothercare operates in about 50 countries, primarily in other parts of Europe, the Middle and Far East, and in Africa and Southeast Asia. It also offers its merchandise, including the in-house MODA maternity clothing line, through catalogs and its Web site. Mothercare increased its presence in the retail toy market with its purchase of the Early Learning Centre in 2007.

DISCUSSION

Target market

Mothercare product is trying to act as a good partner to play with the children who aged from 3 to 9 years old. Please note parents will purchase the product instead of end-customer. Therefore, we should position those people who are around 35years old. (Pagliarini 2000) This group of people usually have stable family relationship and income. However, I recommend that mothercare firm should try to arouse the children's interest thus ask their parents to purchase the product.

Customer needs

We should make the product not only meet the end customer's needs but also create a simple life for consumer. Parents sometimes feel tired after they finish eight hours work, they hope to have time for rest or relax. The main function is to solve the problems for parents. Parents will have time to do something they really want to do while children will have a friend to play with them.

Competition

To be successful, we must do a better job of satisfying target consumers than its competitors. The product constantly compares the value and customer satisfaction delivered by this products, prices, channels and advertising with that of its close competitors. Through this way it can discern areas of potential advantage and disadvantage. Therefore, mothercare firm should formally or informally monitor the competitive environment. We should understand how many competitors in this market, and their marketing objective and strategies. We can also position mothercare target market exactly after we analyse the competitor's situation. Compared with mothercare firm, most of car manufactures usually target the market in the children above 10years old. They focus on foster children's operation ability. For the children under 10years old, they only produce the simple and single function toys. Marketing mix strategies that these manufactures carry out are too boring to catch parent's attention.

KEY COMPETITIVE CAPABILITIES

We are better positioned than our main competitors to take advantage of the increasing demands of upscale independent specialty stores to sharply differentiate their kite selection from those of mass merchants. Because we are going to focus exclusively on importing higher end mothercare for independent specialty stores we will be much better able to serve their needs than current distributors who handle many items other than mothercare and also give their primary attention to larger mass merchandise ...