AQUALISA - aperçu de l'entreprise (document en anglais)

AQUALISA - COMPANY OVERVIEW

Aqualisa is a shower manufacturing company in the U.K. They make electric, mixer and power showers. They cater to people in all the three segments namely Premium, Standard and Value. They sell electric showers under the name 'Gainsborough'. Rawlinson took over as the managing director of Aqualisa in 1998. Aqualisa was having a 25% net return on sales and was having a growth of 5 to 10% in mature market when Rawlinson took over. Aqualisa has come out with a new product by name Quartz. Quartz is one of its kinds in the shower market. It has been developed over a period of three years with a huge investment of € 5.8 million. In spite of its state-of-art technology it is unable to catch the market. Rawlinson, the managing director of Aqualisa, aims at a sale of 100 or 200 units a day from the current 15 units a day.

MARKET SHARE OF AQUALISA

As per the case study,

The major player in the shower market is Triton having sales of 30% of the total sales of showers in UK. The Gainsborough brand of Aqualisa is the third major player in the market followed by Aqualisa. Aqualisa's leads the market in mixer shower sales and is third in powers showers. It is fourth in the overall market. Its power showers are Aquastream Manual and Thermostatic. Its mixer showers are Aquavalve and Aquavalve 609.Aquavalve 609 is the best selling shower of Aqualisa.

MARKETING PLANNING

Malcolm McDonald (2008) defines Marketing Plan as follows in his book

"It is a logical sequence and a series of activities leading to the setting of marketing objectives and formulation of plans for achieving them."(Chapter 1)

A marketing plan essentially consists of

SWOT Analysis

Marketing Objectives

Marketing Strategy

Further in this report, we discuss the marketing plan of Quartz

The major issues lying in front of quartz were

Quartz made a sales of only 15 units a day. Whereas Rawlinson was looking at selling 100 units a day. Rawlinson's managers tell Quartz is a niche product. Now the challenge is to bring quartz into the mainstream.

The plumbers are reluctant to try new electronic products. Even though plumbers appreciated the product at the introduction they were not ready to install it fearing it might fail like the electronic in 80's.

The third issue was Aqualisa had low brand awareness among consumers. So the consumers did not have much knowledge about the breakthrough product.

Analyisng the Strength and Weakness of Quartz

Strength:

The quartz was a breakthrough product in the shower market. Till then, manufacturers only recycled their main product once in five years. No shower had used technology as much as quartz did.

Quartz could be installed in half a day whereas the other showers took 2 days for installation. Moreover, the shortage of plumbers' problem could be addressed by the quartz. The plumbers could attend to more houses if they saved time and the consumers could also save money if they had a plumber working for only half a day. Plumbers charged between €40 to €80 an hour. Calculating plumber's wages at a rate of €60 per hour, a consumer saves a lot through quartz.

Even if the plumber raise their wages level, the product is still beneficial. A plumber could also attend to more clients.

Most showers in UK required excavation of wall. This problem was also addressed by quartz. Quartz was very simple to install and it only needed a small place to place the remote processor.

Quartz was also more reliable. The fact that they looked great is evident from the initial sales figure. The quartz was getting popular among showroom visitors. It was more suitable in houses with kids and older people as it did not require any adjustment every now and then during a bath and there was no variation in pressure of water. The quartz on the whole had a lot of strengths which when marketed well could really make this breakthrough product a huge success.

Weakness

The sales team of Aqualisa spent 90% of their time on existing customers and had very less time on developing new customers. Moreover, the sales team was smaller in size. There was only 20-person to maintain existing as well as develop new customers.

Aqualisa was not very popular with customers directly. Only triton managed to build awareness at consumer level so far. As Aqualisa was not popular with consumers, they were not aware of this wonderful product.

There could be one more challenge for Aqualisa if quartz entered mainstream. Quartz might start competing with the core product of Aqualisa. But worked out the right way, this weakness could become strength.

Opportunities

The biggest opportunity quartz has at the moment is that there is no similar product in the market at the moment. If they tap the market now, they could become market leaders.

Lots of replacements of showers happen in the UK. Quartz could tap this segment to improve their market share.

The quartz has used technology to the core in a shower like no one has ever been done before. This makes it the USP of Aqualisa. And there is a good % of new business which can be developed .

Quartz is THE PRODUCT that could really take Aqualisa popular in every segment if the marketing strategy adopted is really efficient. Discussed below are strategy which could make Aqualisa MARKET LEADER.

Objectives :

Rawlinson aims at selling at least 100 units per day. From the SWOT analysis , we can see that Aqualisa has opportunities of improving sales by developing new customers. Aqualisa has its presence only in 25% of showrooms. The goal should be to increase their presence in more number of places. Their presence in tradeshops is also not significant. If they make their product more popular among plumbers, it is essential that they work on their channels of distribution.

Marketing Strategy

According to Kotler et al, " The logic by which the business unit hopes to achieve its marketing objectives"(Page 156, Chapter 3) is Marketing Strategy. In the marketing strategy, the company has to decide the segment it targets, position the product in such

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