Holistic Marketing

Holistic marketing is a concept that works on the principle of keeping in mind the business as a whole, its place in the broader economy and society, and in the lives of its customers. Comprehensive promoting is an idea that chips away at the guideline of remembering the business overall, its place in the more extensive economy and society, and in the lives of its clients. It endeavors to keep up and create numerous viewpoints on the organization's exercises.

Healthy long term growth for a brand requires that the marketing organization be managed properly. Holistic marketeers must engage in a host of carefully planned, interconnected marketing activities and satisfy an increasingly broader set of constitutions. They must also consider a wider range of effects of their actions. Corporate social responsibility and sustainability have become a priority as organizations grapple with short term and long term effects of their marketing. Some firms have embraced this new vision of corporate enlightenment and made it the very core of what they do.

Nestle follows a holistic approach. It offers products and services that are in the benefit of the consumers. Maggi Pazzta is a light snack, which has made its way right to the top and has gained temendous popularity due to its high quality, convenience and nutrition. The product promises to deliver taste with health.

Branding

A brand is a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers." Branding provides a definition to the tangible and intangible aspects of a product. In terms of an easier understanding, the way a person is defined in terms of personality, the product is defined through its brand. Anything becomes a brand only when people attach some value to it and when it becomes a part of their lives.

Twenty-five years after Nestle brought Maggi instant noodles to India, Nestle extended the brand to ready-to-eat pasta. It has come out with Maggi Nutri-licious (nutritious and delicious) Pazzta. Maggi has been already an established brand in India, thus it was easy to create a brand name for its pasta.

Brand elements

Logo, packaging and labeling

Logo, packaging and labeling plays an extremely important role in the marketing of a product or service. A product/service is identified by its labeling and packaging. The packaging and labeling should be done in a way that it appeals to the targeted customers and should speak for the product itself.

The logo, packaging and labeling of Maggi Pazzta is similar to as of those other maggi products. This is done to aesthetically associate pasta with noodles and other similar maggi products. All the products under the brand maggi use similar kind of visual appeal that is the colors, styles and fonts. This ensures that customers could easily identify a maggi product among competitors.

Tagline

Maggi tweaked its tagline for the exclusivity of pasta, which says  “Taste Bhi, Health Bhi... Khushiyan Bhi” . Khushiyan bhi was added as an extra element to distinguish maggi pazzta from maggi noodles.

Brand Name:

• Distinct brand name ‘Maggi Nutri-licious Pazzta’ .
• Gives a sense of trust and consistency owing to the brand reputation of Maggi.
• The name is representative of the larger territory of operations under Maggi and hence, establish clear lines in this regard.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

Segmentation

Market segmentation is a strategy that involves dividing a broad target market into subsets of consumers, who have common requirements and applications for the relevant goods and services. Depending on the specific characteristics of the product, these sub-parts may be divided by criteria such as age and gender, or other distinctions, demographics or psychographics.

Segmentation is a very important activity as it helps companies to better understand the needs of a specific customer base. Mass marketing assumes that all customers are the same and respond in a similar way to the same type of promotional activities but this is not true. People differ in their requirements and thus need to be catered discretely.

Maggi Pazzta is segmented on the basis of age, eating habits, and lifestyle of urban families.

Targeting

Market targeting refers to choosing a specific group or a set of groups to which a business wants to sell its product or service. It is based on the idea that it is not really possible to make or do something that will please everyone, so a business needs to target specific audience. The targeted audience is known as Target Group. Companies select a specific group to strengthen their brands, as well as to get an idea of potential sales for production or financing purposes.

Maggi Pazzta targets kids, youth, office goers and working women. One of the most important feature of maggi pazzta it can be made within 5 minutes. Thus it targets office goers and working women who do not have much time to cook food for themselves and for their kids.

Positioning

Positioning means how you want your customers and potential customers to perceive your brand. What form of opinion you want them to form about your product. It may be defined as the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the target customer's mind.

It is very important to position your brand smartly. If a product is well positioned, it will have strong sales, and  may become the go-to brand for people who need that particular product. Poor positioning, on the other hand, can lead to bad sales and a dubious reputation. Communication forms a very important part of Positioning and thus must be done with utmost care.

Maggi Pazzta is positioned as, ready to eat product that is easy to cook, healthy as made of Suji and not white flour, and does not take more than 5 minutes of cooking time.

Distribution

Distribution forms the 4th P of Marketing and is extremely crucial in reaching out the product from the manufacturer to the consumer. Distribution refers to how an organisation will distribute the product or service they are offering to the end user. The organization must distribute the product to the user at the right place at the right time. Efficient and effective distribution is important if the organisation seeks to meet its overall marketing objectives. If an organisation underestimates demand and customers cannot purchase products because of it, profitability will be affected.

Two types of channel of distribution methods are available. 

Indirect distribution involves distributing your product by the use of an intermediary for example a manufacturer selling to a wholesaler and then on to the retailer.

Direct distribution involves distributing direct from a manufacturer to the consumer For example Dell Computers providing directly to its target customers. The advantage of direct distribution is that it gives a manufacturer complete control over their product.

FMCG products follow an indirect distribution channel. The reasons are as follow:

1. Large consumer base
2. Faster and convenient distribution
3. Small shelf life

Being a FMCG product it is in the best interest of the company to engage in indirect distribution. Maggi typically follows the distribution channel comprising manufacturer, distributor, stockist, retailer and consumer.

Promotions

Promotions refers to a specific combination of methods used to promote one product or a variety of products. Elements of a promotion mix may include print or broadcast advertising, direct marketing, personal selling, point of sale displays, and/or merchandising.

The promotion mix majorly involves Above the line, Below the line and Intergrated marketing Communication.

Above the line (ATL), below the line (BTL), in organizational business and marketing communications, are advertising techniques, or different strategies companies use to sell their products.

In a nutshell, while ATL communications use media that are broadcast and published to mass audiences, BTL communications use media that are more niche focused. While both ATL and BTL communications can be used to either build brand awareness or drive sales through specific offers (promotions), it is BTL communication that gives the marketer the ability to tailor their messaging in a more personal manner to the audience.

More recently, agencies and clients have switched to an 'Integrated Communication Approach' because of the expansion in terms of media avenues that can be exploited to reach out to the consumers. It is the closest approach to "Through the line" form of promotions which mixes up attributes of Above and Below the line promotions.

Let us attempt to understand the three concepts in greater depth before resorting to our analysis in case of  Maggi Pazzta.

Above the line promotion

Above the line is a type of advertising through media such as TV, cinema, radio, print, banners and search engines to promote brands. Major uses include television and radio advertising, web and Internet banner ads. This type of communication is conventional in nature and is considered impersonal to customers.

BTL (Below The Line) Promotion:

Below the line sales promotions are short-term incentives, largely aimed at consumers. With the increasing pressure on the marketing team to achieve communication objectives more efficiently in a limited budget, there has been a need to find out more effective and cost efficient ways to communicate with the target markets. This has led to a shift from the regular media based advertising. In other words, below-the-line sales promotion is an immediate or delayed incentive to purchase, expressed in cash or in kind, and having only a short term or temporary duration.

Below the Line uses less conventional methods than the usual specific channels of advertising to promote products, services, etc. than Above the Line strategies. These may include activities such as direct mail, public relations and sales promotions for which a fee is agreed upon and charged up front. Below the line advertising typically focuses on direct means of communication, most commonly direct mail and e-mail, often using highly targeted lists of names to maximize response rates.

Integrated Marketing Communications:

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is an approach to brand communications where the different modes work together to create a seamless experience for the customer and are presented with a similar tone and style that reinforces the brand’s core message. Its goal is to make all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations direct marketing, online communications and social media work together as a unified force.

IMC is becoming more significant in marketing practice because of the reduced cost effectiveness of mass media and media fragmentation.Increasingly the strategies of brands cannot be understood by looking solely at their advertising.Increasingly the strategies of brands cannot be understood by looking solely at their advertising.

Maggi pazzta follows more of ATL promotions but has lately adopted the IMC approach. It integrates digital advertising and promotion strategies with personal touch based social mediums like facebook. Maggi Pazzta does 360 degree promotion, which includes TV, Radio, Print and Digital.

Price

Pricing

Pricing is the process of formulating a monetary value for the product in terms of what the company aims to receive in return for the entrepreneurial and financial investment put into its operations.

Pricing  is the thin line that connects the demand and supply factors at play in the market. Both these forces approach one another and interact through changes in the pricing mechanisms and policies.

Consumer Buying Psychology:

Reference Prices:  Consumers have a fairly good idea of the price range for a product, but rarely do they recollect the exact price. When examining a product, consumers often employ Reference Prices, where they compare the observed price to an internal reference price(reference in these terms is made to other products of a similar nature in that specific industry).

For example: Maggi Pazzta is priced at Rs. 23 and Sunfeast Pasta at 18. Other ready to eat noodles like yipee is priced at Rs 20, Ching’s noodles is priced at Rs. 15. So the consumer has a fair idea that to buy such products he may have to shred around 20 bucks.

Price- Quality inferences: Many consumers employ price as an indicator to form perceptions about the quality of a product. Some brands adopt exclusivity and scarcity to signify uniqueness and justify premium pricing. For ex: luxury products, jewellery, high segment automobiles, premium watches etc.

In ready to eat food category, this factor does not play an important role and the choice of product depends entirely on consumers likes and dislikes.

Price endings: Many sellers believe that prices should end in an odd number because for example: many customers see an amplifier priced 2999/- in the range of 2000/- rather than rounding it off to 3000/-

Prices ending in 5 or 0 are easier for the customer to process and retrieve from memory but the technique of manipulating these figures in terms of price endings is in line with the idea of reference prices. A consumer would not find it inconvenient to deal with price listings that end in odd number because he would generally be able to keep the range in mind while deciding between alternatives during the buying decision process.

Maggi Pazzta has distinguishably priced itself at Rs. 23 which a consumer may not forget easily because of its uniqueness to have an odd digit in the end.

Product

The first component of 4 Ps of marketing is product, which can be understood in two forms:

The literal concept

Product Mix is the full set of products offered for sales by an organization. The product mix includes all product lines and categories, which is the variety of products the company has to offer.
For example: Maggi offers products such as Noodles, Pazzta, Sauces, Soups, and Masala.

The broad dimension

Product Mix can be seen as a constitution of various elements including the conception, production, branding and packaging of the product. Together these elements form a certain product offering. Product mix discusses the range of various such offerings.

The four dimensions to a company's product mix include width, length, depth and consistency.

    Width: The width of a company's product mix pertains to the number of product lines that a company sells. For example, if a company has two product lines, its product mix width is two. Small and upstart businesses will usually not have a wide product mix. It is more practical to start with some basic products and build market share. Later on, a company's technology may allow the company to diversify into other industries and build the width of the product mix. 
The width of the product mix in the case of Maggi incorporated Maggi Sauces, Maggi Soups, Maggi Noodles, Maggi Masalas, and Maggi Pazzta.

   Length: Product mix length pertains to the number of total products or items in a company's product mix, according to Philip Kotler's textbook "Marketing Management". For example, ABC company may have two product lines, and five brands within each product line. Thus, ABC's product mix length would be 10. Companies that have multiple product lines will sometimes keep track of their average length per product line. In the above case, the average length of an ABC Company's product line is five.  
In Maggi Pazzta, the product length is 4, as it is available in four variants; Cheese Macroni, Tomato twist, Masala Penne, and Mushroom Penne.

Depth: Depth of a product mix pertains to the total number of variations for each product. Variations can include size, flavor and any other distinguishing characteristic. For example, if a company sells three sizes and two flavors of toothpaste, that particular brand of toothpaste has a depth of six. Just like length, companies sometimes report the average depth of their product lines; or the depth of a specific product line.
Maggi Pazzta does not have a depth of its own. As the product is available in a uniform weight and size, along with four variants.