Marketing Blog #5

As a university student with a tight budget, i always go to food court in ubc village to have my lunch and dinner. I remember that i saw a new store opened in the food court named Traditional Soup last year. And recently i saw it closed down and rerent the place to others. I never see many people in front of their store even when there are long lines in front every other stores. I think i might unfortunately noticed its whole product life circle.

At the Introduction period, sales will gradually increase and profit will increase from negative to positive. I think the Traditional Soup did this and there are several innovators who want to try the soup out. But i never saw they experience the Growth period and the Maturity period. I think they go straight to the Decline period. Why this happens. I think because the have not finish their STP process.

For their situational analysis, I think they successfully identified their opportunity there which is that there are no soup stores like them in the food court and people might want to try the new thing and this can also be their strength because they a new. But they still have weakness which is that they are new for only a short period and they are located at a corner of the food court which is hard for people to see. And threatens are already there, two best selling Chinese food store there.

There product is soup, which i consider will not be enough for my lunch, but they still sell at around $5. So i consider their target market as people who want a soup after lunch or who just want snack soup(maybe they do not think this is their target market). But who are the people go to food court? I think they are mainly students who just want to have a cheap and quick lunch. People who have the spare money might go to white spot and other places like that which locate at center of UBC. So we can assume, their target customer never goes to food court, so they can hardly find the Traditional Soup.

However, if they make some promotion at the introduction period, making their product more accessible and give free trials, they may let more people know about their store. But they did nothing to promote their store which can not turn their innovators to early adopters. Thus, the diffusion of innovation just stopped there, making themselves unknown to their market. I believe that is the main reason that leads to their failure.