Should Maple Salon, Mira Road, Mumbai consider promotional mix to enhance their brand value?

I would extend my heartfelt thanks to the owner of the company - Maple Salon, Ms.Preeti and her team for being so supportive and co-operative during my data collection process. I am also greatly thankful to my subject teacher as well as my IB Diploma Coordinator and the Head of School for inspiring and motivating me. Lastly, I have no words to thanks enough my parents without whose moral support, I would have been unable to complete the task.

Maple Salon is a skin and hair care parlor located in Mira Road, Mumbai, India. The parlor was founded in the year 2015 by Ms.Preeti Salgaonkar along with her mother Ms. Ambika Salgaonkar who is the co-founder of the company. The main services offered by this parlor includes – hair treatments, face treatments, spa, beard treatments and skin treatments like waxing, body polish and many more. This is a small venture run by a small team of around 10 employees in a rented space at one of the prime locations in Mira Road, Mumbai. They do not have any other outlets or branches. The main challenge that the company faces is to acquire a brand value to enter into a market place and fetch more consumers. They follow a B2C (business to consumer) model where the business directly interacts with the clients who visits them. Apart from a few social media profiles and personal references, they do not have any other appropriate marketing or promotional strategy in place currently. As clearly indicated by the main founder in her interview, the main challenge encountered by the company is that there are very few consumers in the market who knows about them and on the top of that there are many other franchisees of popular beauty salon chains in the surrounding area like Enrich, Lakme, Kings and many more who has a made a mostly monopolistic capture on the target market. Thus, creating a brand awareness and making a name in the market to capture more clients the company needs to adopt and implement an effective marketing strategy. This investigation intends to explore that how the use of Guerilla marketing strategy might be useful and effective for this company.

In this investigation, both primary and secondary data will be used.

 

There are three different sources of primary data used in this case:

• Survey report of 100 existing customers at Maple Salon – This survey reports aims to figure out how did the customers came to know about this salon and what are their feedback about the quality of services and pricing structures at this salon.
• Survey report of 100 existing clients in the locality – This survey aims to figure out what image and impression the company currently has in the current target market.
• Interview report with the founder - This is to understand her vision and mission about the implementation of an effective marketing strategy for the growth of her business.

The secondary source used in this investigation is not something that directly links to this company. Two research reports on Guerilla marketing have been used to understand and analyze the odds and goods of using this strategy before implementing it. The research reports are:

• A research report titled – “Guerilla Marketing At It’s Best and The Difficult Challenges it faces” by Dr.Rashad Yazdanifard
• A report titled – “Impacts of Guerilla Marketing on Consumer Buying Behaviour” by Dr.Rizwaan Raheem Ahmed – This report mainly focuses on the way, Guerilla marketing strategy has an impact on the psychological thought process of consumers and thus create a bias in their buying behavior.

Guerilla marketing is one of the most innovative and latest marketing strategies implemented by various small - and large - scale business. As the name suggests, it is a combat marketing tactic that mainly uses surprises or unconventional methods to reach the target consumers and influence their buying behavior or cognitive bias which they use to buy a particular service or product. There are various modes of Guerilla marketing like – indoor, outdoor, event or even experiential. This is usually a low - cost marketing strategy where a company does not need to burn a major share of their asset or revenue to implement it. The examples of Guerilla marketing may include using a poster in public places like railway stations, bus stops and departmental stores or malls, conducting free promotional sessions or events to make more people hear the name of the brand and be aware about it, offer free of cost experiences to some influential target consumers who would promote the salon in lieu of the free services they have enjoyed.

Interpretation of Graph - 1 to Graph - 8

• Most of the existing customers of this salon prefers this through personal references which clearly indicates that marketing or advertising plays almost no or less significant role in fetching new clients for them.
• As far as quality of service and pricing models are considered, a satisfactory level is claimed though there are scope of improvements.
• It is striking to note that a majority of customers who have been residing in this locality since a long time are still not accustomed with the brand name and their services.

In this section, the main aim is to identify the possible strength, weakness, opportunities and challenges or threats to the business organization and thus evaluate that to what extent Guerilla marketing might be actually useful for this organization.

 

Strength

• The salon has got a satisfactory to excellent feedback from existing clients which indicates that they already have an efficient team and infrastructure to run the company and services.
• The salon has a good return from the revenue which offers them a sound financial base to invest more in marketing and advertisement in case they wish to do so.
• The salon has an existing effective organizational and functional culture without any major cultural clash.

 

Weakness

• The salon is yet not able to create any significant customer base through brand value marketing as many potential customers are not even aware of their identity as a service organization.
• The salon must realize that they are under huge competition in a market structure that is oligopolistic in nature and thus have non-uniformity in both pricing and strategies.
• Recently, a lot of employees have left the salon due to some disruption or interruption in the salary structure which made them lose some customers as well.

 

Opportunities

• Better marketing strategies and advertising models are imperative to make more people in the target market know their name.
• Free campaigns, tie up with social media influencers, local make-up professionals will invariably help them to grow more.

 

Threats

• The salon faces a huge threat from the branded outlets in the same locality.
• The salon still does not have certain exotic features of the cosmetic industry like spa and all to fetch super-potential customers.

To conclude the SWOT analysis, it can be seen that understanding that there are other areas of improvement, yet the need of the hour for the salon is to devote and invest more of their financial and creative assets on marketing and advertisement at least for short run to increase the productivity and revenue. Guerilla marketing is thus definitely a potential alternative.

The 4P’s of marketing mix are –

• Place
• Promotion
• Product
• Price

A closer analysis of these four aspects will allow us to delineate the usefulness of Guerilla marketing for this salon.

 

Place – It describes the locations where a customer can get an access to the services or products offered by a business organization. Maple Salon can use Guerilla marketing in creating brand awareness and outdoor marketing as an effective tool to create brand image and awareness. The salon can advertise their services using pamphlets, posters and even models in popular public places like the local railway station, bus-stand and check posts to make more people know about their salon. The locality that this salon belongs to has so many popular checks and traffic signals where huge crowd is formed and large hoardings can boost to foster the popularity and brand name of the salon.

 

Promotion – Guerilla marketing can inadvertently help the company to promote their services. This can be achieved by using both “event ambush” and experiential marketing. As a part of “event ambush”, the salon can open temporary counters and stores in various local exhibitions and fairs. In the locality, there are various carnivals and festivals and some of them are especially about women clothing and accessories. In such events, the company can set up their own counters or store where they can allow customers to directly interact with them and know more about their organization and services. At the same time, the salon can also organize exhibitions personally or be a part of various wedding exhibitions to promote more about their bridal services. As a part of experiential marketing, they can organize free trainings and workshops for aspirant make up artists or beauty professionals. These campaigns will allow the company to reach a larger target market and create brand awareness.

 

Price – The company follows a static pricing strategy and the current clients are more or less satisfied with their pricing models. As indicated by the founder in her interview, the company targets to have a larger focus on lowering the profit margin and increase the net sales. Creating brand awareness will increase their sales and generate more revenue keeping the cost of goods cost and operational cost same. This will allow them to add more economic value to the company and boost their assets.

 

Place – The company is located in a less crowdy or less popular street which is a bit away from the main roads. However, due to effective public transport within that locality, accessibility is never an issue.

Maple Salon has already established some brand name and satisfactory responses amongst their existing clients. However, the main challenge they face is in fetching new customers. Mostly, they get clients through personal references and customers are repeated as well. There is no doubt about the fact that Guerilla marketing strategy if implemented properly will invariably assist them to create a better brand value and create a brand awareness which in turn will expand the target market. This marketing will open the opportunity for market penetration and may even lead to market development by opening new outlets or branches. Financially, the company is in a sound health as indicated in the interview by the founders and thus even if they need to invest a part of their capital for implementing Guerilla marketing, that would not affect the profitability ratios in a negative way or distort the runway of the company.

Guerilla marketing comes at it’s own associated risk as well. There are chances of failure and undesirable conditions like interruption by authority and legal bindings. Thus, even if they wish to apply this marketing strategy, they need to be extremely careful about the plan and it would be better to ensure completely that there are no legal complications associated with.

• Hutter, Katharina, and Stefan Hoffmann. “Guerrilla Marketing: The Nature of the Concept and Propositions for Further Research.” Asian Journal of Marketing, vol. 5, no. 2, Feb. 2011, pp. 39–54. DOI.org (Crossref) https://doi.org/10.3923/ajm.2011.39.54.
• Mohsin Shakeel. “Impact of Guerrilla Marketing on Consumer Perception.” Global Journals Inc. (USA), vol. 11, no. 7.
• Roux, Thérèse. “Does the Guerrilla Win, If He Does Not Lose? Advertising Media Practitioners’ Views on Guerrilla Marketing Challenges and Potential Negative Consequences.” Journal of Public Affairs, vol. 20, no. 2, May 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2007.
• Singhal, Rashi. “Impact of Guerrilla Marketing on the Buying Behavior of Consumers.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3947797.
• SOOMRO, Yasir Ali, et al. “The Impact of Guerrilla Marketing on Brand Image: Evidence from Millennial Consumers in Pakistan.” The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business, vol. 8, no. 4, Apr. 2021, pp. 917–28. DOI.org (CSL JSON), https://doi.org/10.13106/JAFEB.2021.VOL8.NO4.0917.

Question 1 - How did you get to know about this salon?

A. Printed sources like pamphlets or newspaper advertisements.

B. Social media pages like Facebook or Instagram.

C. Personal references.

D. Recommended by someone who was already a client here.

 

Question 2 - How would you rate your experience at this salon out of 5 – 1 = Worst and 5 = Best?

A. 1

B. 2

C. 3

D. 4

E. 5

 

Question 3 - Would you recommend this salon to others?

A. Yes

B. No

C. Yes, but only for some specific services.

D. Not sure.

 

Question 4 - What do you feel is the biggest challenge for this company?

A. They must hire more efficient employees.

B. They must open more outlets.

C. They should decrease the price.

D. A lot of people have not even heard about this salon.

 

Question 5 - Are you satisfied with this salon?

A. Partially yes.

B. Partially no.

C. Yes.

D. No.

Survey - B: Results from survey of 100 random clients in the locality

 

Question 1 - Have you ever heard the name of the salon – “Maple”?

A. No, I have heard their name.

B. Yes, I have heard about them but did not visit them ever.

C. Yes, I have visited them too.

 

Question 2 - What do you prioritize the most while choosing a salon for you?

A. Quality of service.

B. Pricing

C. Location and accessibility

D. Trust and reliability.

 

Question 3 - How many years have you been residing in this locality?

A. Less than a year.

B. Less than 2 years.

C. Less than 5 years.

D. More than 5 years.