Sunlight
For this assignment we had to apply our understanding of marketing metrics and its role in brand performance in a business, by constructively describing, analyzing and critiquing the metrics that were implemented by the Sunlight brand. We then needed to recommend and justify the use of a changed or additional marketing for the brand.
Evaluate Sunlight's philosophy on measuring marketing efforts and recommend additional metrics to be applied.
Brief Objective
Insight
"Perspective"
We began the assignment by Interviewing the previous Sunlight brand Manager, Litha Vimbi, about the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of their branding and marketing efforts, as well as their overall philosophy in this respect to measure their effectiveness and return on marketing spend. How regularly such metrics are calculated and how they are reported to senior management.
From our interview we found that as a global house of brands, Unilever has positioned itself as a brand that prides itself on sustainable growth. They recognize that higher equity does not translate to higher sales. And the valuable target market insights that can be mined from their marketing efforts.
Even with the introduction of new competitors, Sunlight has managed to maintain its positioning and not derail from their set campaign objectives.
Unilever and Sunlight do not focus or align their marketing efforts entirely on competitor activity, but instead invest in the wealth of information on target market insights and trends to ensure their internal house of brands is at optimum and efficient performance. Sunlight prefers to benchmark against its past performance, as they have a wide range of product offerings within their industries.
Their philosophy is that targets and KPI’s (key performance indicators) are set at the beginning of every financial year, either gaining market share or increasing product/brand value. By setting objectives based on where the brand has been and wishes to be in the future and the consumer is the core of the business, the level of satisfaction that they experience as well as brand equity.
What we recommended for Unilever, is that the brand should focus more on what their competitors are doing, as this is something that cannot be ignored and valuable information is available since they share the same target market segment.
They should not be afraid of change and innovation, established brands like Unilever should not hesitate to gain greater market share and target different market segments.
We recommend that they incorporate metrics such as market growth and future demand, as they measure the change in sales revenue over a prescribed period and estimate the future demand of the brand’s product, respectively.
As well as the decomposition of market share, which incorporates penetration share that measuring the comparative acceptance of the brand within the category; share of requirements that measures the level of commitment to the brand by its existing customers against the total category purchases by consumers; and heavy usage index that measures the relative usage of a category by consumers for the brand.