Individual Assignment 1 - Targeting Exercise for PetSmart

Scenario:

You work as the Marcom Manager for Pet Smart. The company is running advertising to try to drive customers into the stores with sales promotion activities (coupons for free gifts and big sales on well-known brands of dog & cat food).

Your objective is to enhance the advertising efforts by coming up with some PR and social media strategies and tactics to get the media and online bloggers talking about Pet Smart and to help drive them into the stores.

Some secondary research about the pet industry includes the following:

The pet industry is booming - Pet owners spend more than $40 billion a year on their four-legged, finned, furry and feathered friends - more than the GNP of all but 64 countries - and a figure that's doubled in the past decade.

More and more newspapers, magazines and national Websites - including New York Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, MSNBC.com and Prevention - have reporters and columnists dedicated to all things pets.

Americans now have twice as many dogs and cats as kids.

Almost two-thirds of all U.S. households own at least one pet.

More companies - from Paul Mitchell to Harley-Davidson - are launching product lines dedicated to pets.

More than half of all pet owners buy their pets holiday gifts.

USE THE "TIPS FOR DISCUSSING YOUR TARGETS AND IDENTIFYING INSIGHTS," (at the end of this document) TO DESCRIBE 2 DIFFERENT TARGETS THAT PET SMART MIGHT ADDRESS IN A MARKETING CAMPAIGN AIMED AT INCREASING SALES AND BUILDING BRAND REPUTATION.

You can use any information about each target group that you uncover in some simple online research and/or talk to friends and family who are pet owners to gain more insight about their different needs and interests that would suggest a need for different strategic approaches to reach and motivate each group. Then write a 1-page target description for each of the two targets by answering the following 5 questions for each, and submitted via email to h..i@fiu.edu or in Canvas Inbox.

Target 1:

1. What descriptive name might you give this target group?

2. What behaviors do they exhibit with regard to the Pet Smart brand that you could take advantage of?

3. What is the fundamental meaning behind their involvement with the pet industry? What aspects of their personalities or motivations are involved?

4. What do these targets think of the Pet Smart brand or the product category of pet products?

5. What over-arching theme might Pet Smart use to create a year-long campaign if this was their primary target?

Target 2:

1. What descriptive name might you give this target group?

2. What behaviors do they exhibit with regard to the Pet Smart brand that you could take advantage of?

3. What is the fundamental meaning behind their involvement with the pet industry? What aspects of their personalities or motivations are involved?

4. What do these targets think of the Pet Smart brand or the product category of pet products?

5. What over-arching theme might Pet Smart use to create a year-long campaign if this was their primary target?

Tips for Discussing Targets and Target Insights

(These tips are meant for describing targets when writing a full integrated marketing communications campaign. This level of detail is not necessary for Individual Assignment 1, but may be useful in answering the questions in that exercise.)

Please note that when preparing a strategic marketing plan, you should thoroughly research your targets and look for secondary information that helps you quantify them, such as demographics, spending profiles, and media usage. You should also undertake primary research to explore insights about your targets that will help you identify their needs, interests and motivations, especially as they relate to the brand problem. When you write the target section of your strategic plan, you should provide information from both your primary and secondary research. Cite some experts who have studied your target (or similar targets), but also include first-hand information that you have collected through interviews, observations, or surveys.

Identifying your Targets

One of the most important aspects of your plan is identifying who your primary target audience should be, and perhaps, one other secondary target that influences your primary target. The client will often tell you who the target is (or who they think it is), but they often have it too broadly defined to help you create meaningful messages. You need to gain a deep understanding of who can most benefit from the client's product and then develop campaign ideas that help to create a strong connection with that group. A secondary target might be key influencers of your primary target, and they may need a slightly different message and approach than your primary targets.

Other targets can be recipients of your promotional materials and messages, but you should focus your strategies on your primary targets.

CREATIVE NAMING OF YOUR TARGETS

Provide a creative name for your targets that reflects who they are both demographically and emotionally. For example, if your targets are middle-aged women, you might want to use a female name that was popular in the years when they were born and tie it to an emotional state that helps to identify a key insight about them. (A simplistic example of this would be an investment firm identifying a group of older female targets "Nervous Nelly" because they grew up in the Great Depression and are now afraid to invest in any financial product that has any degree of risk associated with it.)

If gender and age are not issues, pick a name that relates to their professional status or ideology or other factors that relate to the product category. DO NOT use a generic name that has been coined to describe large demographic group like DIYers, or DINKYs, or GenX, or Baby Boomers, etc. Your target may fall into one of these groups, but you should be much more specific than this, and the creative name you develop should be unique to your target's characteristics.

For example, the candy maker, Mars, identified a group blue collar men who ate Snickers as a between meal snack to keep their energy up, and called them "HUNGER SATISFIERS." But they might identify women who only buy the snack size versions of Snickers to keep the calorie count down as 'DEBBIE DIETER" or "CAREFUL CALORIE COUNTERS." The name is often only used internally to help describe the target and is not necessarily mentioned in any external marketing materials.

DESCRIBING YOUR TARGETS

Provide some brief demographic and psychographic information about them (from your secondary research), and then spend the majority of your target discussion on the insights you uncovered through your own primary research or from experts who have studied them. If you undertake any formal primary research, you should provide an appendix with copies of your research instruments and summary tables of your findings. If you conduct interviews with a number of targets, you should insert pertinent verbatim comments in the text of your target discussion, and create an appendix for a more extensive list of verbatim comments organized by topic.

You should research and report information that reveals some core insights about your target's behavior as it relates to the purchase of your product or product category. The most important aspect of the exercise is uncovering the core motivational factors and portraying how they manifest themselves in thought and behavior.

In addition to providing a brief overview of the key demographic, psychographic, and consumption information that you uncovered about your target from secondary sources, you should explore and report on the following dimensions of your target's consuming experience:

Behavior - an overview of their actual behavioral practices and some recommendations for how your product could take advantage of these

Meaning - What are the fundamental motivations behind the consumption behavior? How might the behavior be related to core aspects of an individual's personal self-esteem, and related constructs from the Consumer Behavior theories discussed throughout the course?

Thought - What do the individuals who make up your target think about the brand or product category? What do they think of their own consumption? How do these thoughts relate to other aspects of the "narrative" the individuals tell themselves in thought and behavior? How could your product utilize this knowledge to get a competitive advantage with this target group?

Your strategic plan should provide a set of conclusions and/or recommendations at the end of your target discussion about how you would have your brand respond to the insights.

Other questions to answer about them:

How many are they? Where are they?

What are their abilities to interact with the brand?

What message is most critical for them to hear?

What media and online vehicles are most used by them?

Who influences them?