Posted: January 6th, 2023

Revitalising a Mature or Declining Product or Service

Revitalising a Mature or Declining Product or Service

Assignment Task
Revitalising a Mature or Declining Product or Service
A mature product or service is one that has been on the market for a long time and has reached a stage of slower growth or decline in terms of sales and demand. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as changing consumer preferences, increased competition, or the introduction of newer, more innovative products or services.

In the case of a declining product or service, the decline may be more dramatic and may require the company to take action in order to try to reverse the trend. This could involve revising the product or service offering, lowering prices, increasing marketing efforts, or finding new ways to differentiate the offering from competitors.

Managing a mature or declining product or service can be a challenging task for a company, as it may require making difficult decisions about how to allocate resources and make changes in order to remain competitive. However, with careful planning and execution, it is possible for a company to successfully revitalize a mature or declining product or service and return it to growth.
Assignment Objectives

• To investigate a product or service with slow or declining growth

• To conduct research and develop analytic insight

• To develop a marketing strategy based on this insight

• Prepare a formal business report

• Groups of between 2 – 6 members can be the same as your presentation group.

Assignment Overview

It is an inevitable part of the product life cycle that your brand or service will eventually find itself in maturity / declining growth. Mature or declining markets require careful thought as to how to revitalise or reinvigorate consumers attitudes towards a product or brand. Examples of these kinds of products or services are plentiful – Carnival cruises, print media (magazines, newspaper), sugary drinks (i.e. Coca Cola), fast food, streaming platforms like Netflix, even Zoom – just to name a few! These products/services are facing stagnant growth, having run out of new customers and markets to acquire, or faced with unpopularity given changing consumer trends.

Your role in this assignment is to identify a product/service with stagnant growth, develop insights into this product/service, and build a marketing strategy from these insights.

The assignment has three parts:

Part 1: Market Analysis (1000 words), split into:

• Part 1a – Identify a Branded Product or Service with Stagnant Growth (500 words)

• Part 1b – Evaluate the Stagnant Branded Product or Service’s Current Marketing Strategy (500 words)

Part 2: Developing an Insight (Method) (1500 words), split into:

• Part 2a – Data Collection Overview (500 words)

• Part 2b – Developing an Insight (Outline Key Insights) (1000 words)

Part 3: Outline your Insight Driven Marketing Strategy (1500 words)

Part 1: Market Analysis

Part 1a – Identify a Branded Product or Service with Stagnant Growth (500 words) Your first task is to pick a specific branded product or service that exhibits stagnant or declining growth. In this section you will evaluate and provide evidence to justify why your group views this branded product or service as being in a stagnant growth market or exhibiting stagnant growth. As a guide, you are looking for products or services that are experiencing less than 3% growth per year (however, growth is sometimes the cause of other products in the portfolio, such as water or fruit juices in the case of Coca Cola Ltd, so we need to be careful with these numbers).

A more nuanced approach would use industry reports via Passport or IBIS world – these are available via the Uni library database. You could also brainstorm products or services that you think are in maturity or decline (perhaps as a result of Covid) and start your research from this point.

Part 1b – Evaluate the Stagnant Branded Product or Service’s Current Marketing Strategy (500 words) Once you have established stagnant growth, the second step of this section is to evaluate the current marketing strategy for the branded product/service. This area should explain but also analyse the marketing strategy – what are they doing well and not so well? This will be important for your marketing strategy (Part 3) as you should respond to some of the gaps you have found. You may wish to use the 4Ps (or 7, for a service) to structure your answer:

Part 2: Developing Customer Insights

Part 2a – Data Collection (500 words)

Just like consumer researchers, your group must do some primary data collection for this assignment. In this section describe what data your group has collected and justify your approach to data collection. Here are some suggestions on how to collect your data:

• Interview people who are consumers of your chosen branded product/service.

• Conduct a survey on consumer attitudes and usage towards your chosen branded product/service.

• Take observational notes (called ‘field notes’) of people using/buying a branded product/service.

• Take observational notes of YouTube vloggers who create content about this brand product/service. You should try to understand the customers for this product in some way. How do they use it, why? What do they like / not like about it? A good way to think about and structure your data collection is to consider the figure from Lecture 1, Slide 6 “What is consumer behaviour?”

Part 2b – Developing an Insight (Outline Key Insights) (1000 words)

Discuss in detail key insights about you chosen branded product/service that you learned from your data collection. An insight should be developed by looking at all the data you collected and finding some themes or commonalities. For example, do all your informants talk about the same problems, or different ones? What do they consider important when it comes to the product/service? Focus on 2-3 key insights that you have learnt from your data collection that will help to guide your ideas and strategy.

It is very important to give your reader a good idea of what you found. When you discuss your insights, you should provide some evidence of what you collected, such as quotes from people you have spoken to, or images you have collected. Tables and infographs will also be helpful in this section.

Part 3 – Outline your Insight Driven Marketing Strategy (1500 words)

What did you group learn from your data collection on consumers that can be turned into a marketing strategy? In this section your task is to turn the 2-3 key insights from part 2 into an actionable idea that could be implemented by the brand.

For example, did you learn something about how your product/service is used that led to you considering a new promotional strategy that can highlight this? Or, did you develop an insight into why the product is consumed that made you think of a new form of product development?

The best insight driven strategies will be supported using theory from the course. It is expected that at least one theory from the course is used to underpin your ideas in this section. In the promotion example above, you may think to teach your audience about a new way to use the product, so there are clear links to learning and involvement (week 9).

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