Essay on Chobani's Strategic Marketing: Gaining a Competitive Edge in the Saturated Yoghurt Market

Introduction

Strategic marketing is a plan process involving development and implementation of strategies to gain a competitive advantage in a market segment (Kerin &Hartley, 2017). In Chobani's case, the yoghurt market is already saturated at the time they are entering it. Thus, it is crucial to employ strategic marketing as an instrument of penetrating such competitive market. It clearly outlines the get to market path with precision. Focusing on the 4P'S of marketing, product, price, place, and promotion is central in strategic marketing.

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Target Marketing

Target marketing is critical for a competition-crowded market. It adopts focus or emphasis on a unique segment of the whole market- a niche. For Chobani, the Greek-Yoghurt market is the niche. As peter McGuiness, Chobani CMO reiterated to the NEW YORK TIMES, the company will have one foot squarely in the Greek yoghurt space, leaning into a more aspirational life space. This will prove viable for the company as it reduces the competitive space. Focusing on product is even more critical in a niche, since developing a unique product pushes the company to a deeper niche almost to a monopolistic state. As Niel Sandfort, Chobani's Marketing Director puts it, it all comes down to a great product. As quoted by Xie, Truesdell, and O'Rourke (2013), Chobani's timing was flawless. There were minimal Greek-style yoghurt competitors, but more crucial was Chobani's high protein and reduced-fat product preferred by the surging health-conscious Americans.

Promotion

Promotion creates product awareness for consumers and improves it marketability. Chobani's emphasis on unique packaging and price would prove very useful in the market. Their packing, unique from competitors is a competitive edge by itself. It isolates them in the shelves and gets people to pay more attention to the products. As quoted by Edwards (2013), Niel Sandfort reiterates that social media provides the best promotion platform. It creates a mass platform or a community where clients share their mood for the new product with new fans. The promotion content directed at consumers is also very crucial. For example, the "Love This Life", To love this life is to live it naturally is very essential for Chobani's marketing, it elicits more interest from the lifestyle conscious consumers. Blake Mitchell as quoted by Buss (2015), argues that consumers get more attraction for the reasons a brand exists, this enables a band to tap into their emotions.

Distribution

Place is one of the elements of marketing. For Chobani, realizing market expansion would mean improving distribution points or retail areas. By avoiding customer bias and not emphasizing on clients on Upper East of Manhattan, Chobani's market size would grow. Through exploiting the full market potential, in six years Chobani had the U.S, Australia, and U.K as its markets (Xie, Truesdell, & O'Rourke, 2013). Stretching out the market locale would go along way in establishing the market dominance of Chobani.

Conclusion

Chobani uniquely put itself in the Greek-style yoghurt market niche. Through adoption of contemporary promotion strategies, product quality focus, to customer-oriented marketing their product market is very promising. Given that they operate within a segmented market their growth in market is not very vulnerable, albeit they have to reengineer their strategies frequently to maintain that competitive edge.

References

About New Campaign. Retrieved June 30, 2016, from brandchannel.com:

Buss, D. (2015, May 4). 'Love This Life': 5 Questions with Chobani Execs http://brandchannel.com/2015/05/04/5-questions-chobani-050415/Kerin, R. A. & Hartley, S. W. (2017). Marketing. (13th ed.). New York, New

Xie, Y., Truesdell, K., & O'Rourke, J. S. (2013). Chobani: Managing explosive growth, aggressive competition and threats to product quality. The Eugene D. Fanning Center for Business Communication, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. York: McGraw-Hill Education.