FIRST TOPIC: SEGMENTATION TARGETING POSITIONING

Simon is the Marketing Director of Sunrise Furniture Supplies, a medium-sized company which specialises in manufacturing office furniture. The company makes its products in India, China and Malaysia so benefiting from relatively low labour costs. However, it has recently experienced intense competition from suppliers who have even lower cost bases. Simon has decided that his company will benefit if he focuses on those customers who can provide higher profit margins. Increasingly, private households, particularly those with computers, are converting spare rooms into office-style areas. He has decided to target customers in Australasia, since many of them have started working from home in recent times. To cater to their needs Simon has decided to hire your services to better explore the segment of work-from-home customers. Outline how you would go about carrying out a segmentation analysis in this instance and what criteria would you use for conducting the segmentation analysis. SECOND TOPIC: BASED ON INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATION (FOLLOWUP)

Having spent a lot of time and resources and with your help, Simon has now enough insights into the work-from-home culture. The next step in the process for Simon wold be to initiate a marketing communications programme to reach out to those customer.He has realised that marketing communication involvesadvertising, public relations, direct selling, sales promotion and increasingly web-based marketing. A furniture showroom would be part of this but a wider approach will be needed. The target market is people working from home and the promotional methods used should be appropriate to this market. He has again come to you to seek advice on how best to put together an Integrated Marketing Communication campaign to create awareness amongst those potentialcustomers who work from home. Can you outlines a communication campaign which might achieve the objective(s) set out by Simon?