Essay on Zigzag: International Manufacturing Giant's Successful Segmentation & Positioning Strategy

Zigzag is an international manufacturing company with its headquarters in London, United Kingdom. It deals with assembling and selling of vehicles and motor spare parts in Europe and Asia. The company is highly recognized for its super quality products at low prices. Zigzag is using market segmentation and positioning strategy in the marketing of the vehicles. The approach has produced excellent results of high sales, improvement of financial performance, and consistent growth of the company. I have been an employee in the Zigzag company ltd for five years. I started as a manager in the assembling unit, where I served for three years and then was promoted to the overall marketing manager. I had been a journey of ups and downs as we adopt the strategy of market segmentation, targeting, and positioning of our products. It involved a process before Zigzag products were positioned in the global market. The company chose a quality low price approach to shine over the customers and stand itself to the customers globally.

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Whether internationally or domestic, the positioning process involves steps that include identifying target markets, analyzing the competition within the focused market, identifying points that differ with the competitors, and then enhancing the reposition (Dietrich et al.,2017). The marketing team of Zigzag Company first identified Asia, America, and Europe as the group of market segments to consider as potential markets. After the identification of the group market segments, I, with the help of the marketing committee, we chose the market segments to enter. The market segments are identified based on geographic areas, demographics, psychographic similarities, consumer income levels, and product benefits and use (Dibb, 2017). However, Zigzag limited values, a combination of these segments but with a common element, forms the best target market for the success of the marketing strategies.

For the company, the critical consideration in the target markets is whether the consumers are willing to spend on the commodities. Product positioning signals the price of a product. Zigzag, choose the segments which that wanted vehicles for business purposes, private use but could not afford the expensive ones. The marketing committee decided to position the products as high-quality vehicles but less costly. The target market would then be the middle-class individuals, small and middle business people, and commercial farmers across Asia and Europe continents. Several countries from the continents are developing, especially Asia, which made them the perfect target (Chan et al., 2016).

For success in the industry, both the rational and emotional needs of customers are considered by the marketing department (Magalhaes et al., 2019). The reasonable need is easily identified as the customer requests from the company. However, the emotional need is challenging to point out as it involves customer feelings. Zigzag limited have targeted the need for middle-class customers to purchase their vehicles, the need by the farmers to transport their farm outputs to the market in time, and the need by small and middle businesses to transport raw materials to working stations and doing suppliers as the rational needs of the customers. For the emotional needs, the company carried a research on the emotional reactions of the customers from the existing products of competitors.

Results from the survey showed that potential customers could not own vehicles due to them being expensive. The issue of high charges by the transporters was raised as well as being inconvenient. The complaints from the target markets developed the emotional needs that Zigzag Company chose to satisfy. For continuing spotting of the emotional needs, the company pays close attention to customer dissatisfaction behaviors, prioritizes the emotional needs of the clients, and refocuses the solutions to make them feel better. By taking care of the customers' needs emotionally, the company leaves a lasting impression, which helps in creating brand loyalty (Hollensen, 2010).

The motor industry is concentrated with a lot of players, for instance, Toyota, Audi, Ford, Nissan, and others more. Zigzag, to penetrate the market, had to be different as compared to the key competitors. The marketing officials identify all potential competitors, including product vs. product, brand vs. brand, and company vs. company. All these levels of competitors affect the effort of positioning a product or company (Hassan & Craft, 2012). Zigzag limited has differentiated its products by having a high-quality but at a lower price. This combination is less to found among the competitors. High-quality vehicles are highly-priced, and thus a significant opportunity for Zigzag to offer high-quality products at a lower price. This is achieved by sourcing raw materials from related companies and hiring cheap labor from developing countries. The other benefit of Zigzag is setting up assembling plants near to the market to minimize operating costs. This made the company unique by offering quality products but at a lesser price compared to key competitors.

The current international positioning of Zigzag's limited company is a giant firm that offers excellent vehicles at a fantastic cost. The products have both shares of mind and stock of heart from the customers. The percentage of the intention of Zigzag Company is highly attributed to tangible attributes such as high-quality products, long years of services, and availability of spare parts and cheap to purchase and maintain. The products have the share of the heart by having emotional components of the consumer attitudes, and expectations are part of the product positioning. Zigzag uses "You are capable" the unique selling proposition. This statement encourages the middle-class people, and small and medium people in business feel the potential of owning a vehicle. With the individual future of lowering the cost, Zigzag limited makes the products affordable by the middle-income earners.

The current positioning of the Zigzag Company of price and quality faces some advantages and weaknesses. Since the products are of good quality, improving the quality will signal the customers that the price will increase too (Martin, 2011). When prices are raised, the customers rarely complain as they have in mind that the quality is high, but the prices are maintained as low as possible (Perreault, 2018). Potential and existing customers perceive the prices of Zigzag as limited as customers caring. The slogan that runs in customer minds is better quality with the least cost. Besides the benefits, the company also faces challenges as a result of the current positioning. When the production costs increase, it is difficult to increase prices by the same margin as they should be as cheap as possible. Moreover, it becomes challenging for the company to add more quality features to produce in efforts to reduce production costs (Fahy & Jobber, 2015).

Being an international company, Zigzag limited incurs a lot of research costs of customer behavior and markets in foreign countries. It has to hire marketing firms to conduct in-depth surveys and research to come up with conclusions on the best segments to focus on and the approach to use in positioning. Attention capturing in new markets becomes a challenge in international marketing as the communication channels are overloaded with various advertisements. Choosing the best means of advertising products becomes a problem in global markets as the message should adequately reach the target market (Camilleri, 2018). The choice of packaging, color, and the combination of words to use varies according to different cultures in each country.

References

Dietrich, T., Rundle-Thiele, S., & Kubacki, K. (2017). Segmentation in social marketing. Springer Singapore. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-981-10-1835-0.pdf

Dibb, S. (2017). Changing times for social marketing segmentation. In Segmentation in social marketing (pp. 41-59). Springer, Singapore. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-1835-0_4

Chan, C. C. H., Hwang, Y. R., & Wu, H. C. (2016). Marketing segmentation using the particle swarm optimization algorithm: a case study. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 7(6), 855-863 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12652-016-0389-9

Magalhaes, M., & Pereira, M. (2019). The marketing strategy and implementation of strategic business units: How to choose a methodology of segmentation strategic marketing?.http://repositorio.uportu.pt:8080/handle/11328/2930

Martin, G. (2011). The importance of marketing segmentation. American Journal of Business Education (AJBE), 4(6), 15-18. https://clutejournals.com/index.php/AJBE/article/view/4359

Perreault, W. D. (2018). Essentials of marketing. New York: Mc Graw Hill. http://203.158.215.182/handle/123456789/3202

Hollensen, S. (2010). Marketing management: A relationship approach. Pearson Education. https://lib.hpu.edu.vn/handle/123456789/28635

Hassan, S. S., & Craft, S. (2012). Examining world market segmentation and brand positioning strategies. Journal of Consumer marketing. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/07363761211247460/full/html?journalCode=jcm

Fahy, J., & Jobber, D. (2015). Foundations of marketing. https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents

Camilleri, M. A. (2018). Market segmentation, targeting and positioning. In Travel marketing, tourism economics and the airline product (pp. 69-83). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-49849-2_4