Holistic Marketing

Holistic Marketing concept is based on development,design and implementation of marketing programmes, processes and activities that recognize the breadth and inter-dependencies.

Social Responsible Marketing:

Corporate Social Responsibility of classmate. For sale of every four notebooks, Re 1 is donated to the foundation that manages the education of poor and needy.

Integrated Marketing:

Classmate employs all components of Integrated Marketing Mix to reinforce the brand image and increase sales.

Relationship Marketing:

Customers are being provided with all the variants that satisfy their requirements. For dealers and retailers, classmate offers discount on other stationery products like geometry boxes, pens and pencils to ensure a good relationship. The discount percentage depends the facts and quantitative report presented by dealers.

Internal Marketing:

Classmate's marketing manager is entrusted with responsibilities of developing and managing all the aspects of email programs to successfully drive traffic, building membership loyalty, increasing member to member and community engagement, generating incremental member guaranteed content and creating upgrades.

Brand

A brand is a name, term, symbol, design or combination of all these, intended to identify the goods or services of one or group of sellers and to differentiate them from competition.

It is the seller's promise to deliver the same bundle of benefits/services consistently to buyers.

Classmate as a brand promises to deliver notebooks of high quality and Eco-friendly paper.
It is the pioneer of organization of the notebook industry.

Classmate with its product features  and customer value have ensured that the customers always prefer classmate over its competitors.  Also the number one status of the classmate notebook has been the status symbol for the customers.

Classmate has always catered to the requirements of the target group by introducing variants. This helped classmate to strengthen the loyalty factor and this helped in establishing the emotional connect with the brand.

Classmate puts in a lot of focus on brand management.It consistently delivers the product that matches the expectations and also provides additional features. It enhances the emotional connection within the people by its ad campaigns which focus on uniqueness and also specialties in a kid.
The market mix component are well put in to use to maintain the brand image.

These pictures show different cover designs, variants and also an example of promotions that classmate has done to maintain its brand and number one position in terms of market share.

Analyzing Markets and buying behaviour

Markets:

• There are two markets. Consumer Markets and Business Markets.
• If a company directly sells its products to customers then it is called B2C selling and if company sells to another company , this process is B2B selling.

Buying behavior:

1. Problem Recognition                   
2. General need description            
3. Product Specification                   
4. Supplier Search                           
5. Proposal Solicitation
6. Supplier Selection
7. Order-Routine Specification
8. Performance review

Characteristics of B2B and B2C Marketing:

Classmate is a notebook priced at Rs 40.  Classmate implements B2C marketing. The look and cover always change according to trends.

In B2C marketing the social acceptance and image are of high importance. Classmate made sure that there is high quality and also enjoyed the I.T.C. image . This ensured high approval.

There are different preferences for the customers. So it is important to satisfy all their requirements and preferences. For example a person might want plain notebook, another might want broad ruled notebook, and some other might want single ruled notebook, classmate made sure that it had all variety of notebooks.  Multipurpose books have also been launched for the college students.


Classmate has dealers and retailers as intermediaries between the company and customers.
Transaction between dealer and classmate can be a B2B transaction and similarly transaction between dealer and retailer is also B2B.
Here the sales of classmate to dealers depends on facts and figures of all the variants that are sold. If the sales of one particular variant is more then there is a possibility that the dealer wants more of that variant. Same applies to the retailer dealer transaction. The B2B marketing depends on quantifiable results.

                                       

Segmentation, Targeting and Proposition

Segmentation divides market into well defined slices which consists of a group of customers who share a similar set of requirements. Segmentation consists of different variables like Geographic, Demographic, Psycho-graphic and Behavioral.

Targeting is selecting selecting specific segment(s) which company and marketers feel could generate  maximum revenue.

Positioning is the act of designing a company's offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of the target group.


Classmate as it is a stationery product hence it targeted the students segment. Their main target is school children and other students (graduation and post graduation). Their marketing and promotions and IMC marketing mix were always student targeted. Classmate also made sure to win over the influences (parents, elders ) of school kids.

"For the Big Ideas in you" made the students feel that they can do great things and hence they were associated with the brand . They positioned themselves as brand that is made for students with big ideas.

Recently Classmate changed its tagline to "Because you are one of a kind". In the last decade, there has been a lot of pressure on school students to get into foundation classes, do what top scorer in their class gets. There was no encouragement for their real talent. By changing tagline to this and conducting an ad campaign, they tried to make every child feel unique and special and also influence the parents.  This has been a hugely successful positioning and campaign.
                             
       

Sales Management

Sales management is attainment of an organization's sales and goals in an efficient and effective manner through planning ,staffing, training ,leading and controlling organizational resources.

Promotion component of Marketing Mix has personal selling, advertisements, public relations, sales promotion and direct marketing under it.

Personal Selling:
Direct oral communication explaining the features of the product and persuade the customer to buy. This has the advantages of flexibility, minimizes wasted effort and facilitates buyer action. It  has disadvantages of high cost, message inconsistency and sales person motivation.

Classmate employed this personal selling in the introductory stage. Classmate employed sales person, agents and jobbers to go to different schools in rural areas. Also these sales people went to different stationery shops and convinced them to buy classmate notebook.

Classmate identified wholesalers in different regions and sent their sales representatives to convince and persuade the wholesalers to buy the product.

IMC and Promotion

IMC marketing consists of Advertising, Sales Promotion, Events and Experiences. Public Relations and Publicity,Direct Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Word of mouth marketing and personal selling.

Classmate IMC marketing mix.

Advertisement link:

http://www.afaqs.com/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=36228&media=TV&type=Indian

 

I.T.C. also sponsors for events in different events. Depending on the event and the place where it is sponsoring, I.T.C. makes sure that the concerned products are present on the banners there.

 I.T.C sponsored Inter-bang event in SIBM and made sure that classmate appeared on the banners.

Distribution

Classmate's main manufacturing unit is at Bhadrachalam , Andhra Pradesh. After it is manufactured it is dispatched to various places to make it available for the customers. This is done by intermediaries i.e. distribution channels.

• At the time of launch, classmate hired agents to distribute the notebooks in the villages. A district was assigned to an agent and he distributed the books to school children. 
• After make a mark , Classmate's agents to distribute to the mom and pop stationery stores.
• Now classmate has many agents and many distribution channels. 

The transportation channel carries the goods carries from main manufacturing to regional and from regional to state warehouses. Here the agent or a jobber is hired to personally go to prescribed locations to deliver the books and transactions are done through the jobber. The jobber gets certain commission from the company. 

Classmate is in the maturity stage of the ILC and hence it tries to increase its coverage area by reaching to more people.
During the intro stage it focused on the rural area schools and then to the metro cities.
During growth stage it increased it reach in all possible dimensions.
Now being in the maturity phase classmate tries to maximise the revenue.

In PUNE, Pradeep book depot at Hadapsar, Bharat depot at Pimpri are the whoslesale dealers for classmates. And in India there 75000 stationery outlets.