Improvement of company marketing strategy

<p>Despite rubber and plastic articles production is one of the most red-hot sectors of Russian industry, in 2013 Nord Company suffered from crisis caused by sharp slump in demand for the company&rsquo;s production.</p><p>The <strong>purpose</strong> of this work is to reveal the reasons for the enterprise decline and to propose the recommendations for Nord company marketing strategy advancing.</p><p>For the above mentioned purpose achievement it is necessary to complete the following tasks:</p><p>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To clarify the basic theoretical concepts and models.</p><p>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To define the main reasons for demand reduce.</p><p>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To analyse the strong and weak points of the company&rsquo;s marketing strategy.</p><p>4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To develop recommendations for Nord marketing strategy development.</p><p>5.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To estimate the economic effectiveness of the offered recommendations.</p><p>The research <strong>methodological foundation</strong> is the method of structure-functional analysis and system approach. The method of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, comparison and analogy, inquiry and economic-mathematic were used in this work. Quantative method implemented in this research is questionnaire survey of the company&rsquo;s existing and potential clients. The qualitative method is applied by Nord management in-depth interview.</p><p>The following results of the work were obtained: Nord consumers&rsquo; opinion poll showed the above mentioned <strong>problems</strong>: the company has weaker positions in reputation and communication efficiency in comparison with the closest competitors. The <strong>advantages </strong>of the company are production high quality and reasonable prices as soon as flexibility in customer service and additional options providing.</p><p>On the basis of obtained results the following conclusion about the <strong>company positioning</strong> was made: the enterprise tends to be customer-focused but still doesn&rsquo;t have reputation high enough because of ineffective communication.</p><p>As a result of <strong>product stewardship</strong> &nbsp;&nbsp;analysis we&rsquo;ve found out that sales level decline happened in the most profitable and salable product category. This causes the necessity of the key partners loss compensation by client base widening and new profit-making activity area implementation.</p><p>The basic <strong>price strategies</strong> of the company are deep penetration to the market and price premium strategies.</p><p>The fact that such crucial partners as APZ, LLC, Discom, LLC and TransKommersh, LLC that in total took almost 50 % of all company&rsquo;s sales volume were lost discovers weak efficiency of Nord&rsquo;s <strong>sales policy</strong>, insufficient market environment monitoring and shows the need for minimization of risks motivated by the company&rsquo;s dependency on its partners.</p><p>The analysis of <strong>communication strategy</strong> established a fact that managers of Nord company don&rsquo;t pay enough attention to the main enterprise&rsquo;s communication channel &ndash; personal salesmanship. Besides because of job duties diversity and time shortage of the marketing expert he hasn&rsquo;t got the possibility to effectively consider all proposals on each business direction. This causes law rating of the company&rsquo;s reputation and communication efficiency.</p><p><strong>The following recommendations were given in this work: </strong></p><p>1.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Development of the most beneficial (24.4 % of return on sales) and the least implemented (13 % of production sharing) direction &ndash; co-production with press-tool manufacturers.</p><p>2.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Common items accessories cost reduce for the weakest good group sales promotion.</p><p>3.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Sales engineer employment and diversification of duties between him and marketing expert for increase of sales and marketing level.</p><p>4.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Advertizing campaign in the internet and more active participation in industry events for reputation improvement and rise of the enterprise&rsquo;s communications efficiency.</p><p>The established external uncontrolled reason for Nord activity decline was cooperation refusal of the basic company&rsquo;s partners caused by decline of demand on final product. Internal reasons for crisis were sales inefficiency, inadequate evaluation of the market, low reputation of the company and weak communication policy. But Nord marketing strategy development measures are estimated to give the possibility for increase of financial and competiveness strengthening of the company in 2014 year.&nbsp;</p>