Real-Life Decision Making
As the individual responsible for setting the direction of a company's marketing efforts, a brand manager is constantly making decisions about how to best do the job. They need sharp decision-making skills to choose the right option when it comes to everything from what kind of product to make to how to make it, package it, distribute it and price it.
You're a brand manager for a popular juice company. Your job selling a well-known brand to consumers is easy, until the day a minor competitor introduces the world to non-frozen, non-concentrated, fresh, chilled juice, packaged in a kind of milk carton with a screw lid. The new product takes the market by storm and your company is left scrambling to compete.
The problem is your company's packaging and distribution method. You've always packaged your juice in large packages with long shelf lives. You've stored your product in a warehouse and delivered it to stores according to demand, without the pressure of rushing to deliver a properly dated product.
But your competitor's product markets itself on freshness, packaged and delivered the same way milk is. You simply don't have the same means to make and distribute a competitive product.
You explore your options. If you decide to compete, you couldn't do it alone. You would have to partner with a dairy with the manufacturing and delivering means to get a product with your brand name to the shelves alongside your competitor's. But then you could only take a cut of the profits.
Your other option is not to compete in this area of the juice market, sticking rather to your tried and true method of making and delivering juice. You still have a loyal customer base, and pricing is still in your favor -- your brand is considerably cheaper than the pricey new product launched by your competitor. You could wait it out until the trend fades, trusting your product will eventually return to market dominance.
What do you do?