Assessment 3



Assessment 3

Unilever spends up after Lipton re brand confusion

Product

The product is the conventional tea, which was rebranded as the black tea. There was no change in the contents of the product, only the name changed. Due to the changing trend of introducing new varieties of tea in the market, people thought that it was also a new variant. For example green tea is a variant of teas but it has an entirely different taste, and is targeted towards health conscious people due to its benefits. Changing the name of the tea to black had the same effect on the mind of the consumers as they thought it was an entirely new thing. Tea is an original product that should have been conveyed in Unilever's new packaging. I believe that the differentiation of the other teas was done as they were not originally there in the market. The market for Unilever's tea is mature, and does not need the confusion to be removed.

Place

The place where the products were being sold were supermarkets as the case mentions about the shelves. The product is such that it is part of the monthly grocery of the target market. Apart from that, tea is sold at major convenience stores, and retail outlets. When the company rebranded its product, it was seen differently by the consumers as they did not see the product they expected to see. The new packaging made the consumers see a different product which lead them to see a different product. The customers thought that the new packaging was a replacement of their product. Packaging is the silent salesman for a product, and in this case the message that was communicated was different from what they intended to tell. The product was still at the same place where it was sold, but because of it different packaging the consumers thought it was a different product.

Price

The change had nothing to do with pricing as it was a differentiating change. They wanted their product to stand out in the middle of all the other alternates available such as green tea, and herbal. Because of the term used for the other tea, Lipton decided to use the technical term for its tea which the consumers had not been aware of all this time. The consumers were used to having the normal tea, and that is how it was positioned in their mind. The company entirely changed the positioning rather than focus on making the product more prominent. Pricing was not the tool used to promote the new change (Kotler, 2009). The product did not suffer from falling sales; the purpose was to make the product stand out from the rest.

Promotion

The promotional campaign launched to rectify the message that the company was actually trying to communicate. The main purpose of the change was to communicate the unique identity of the product. The product was tea which is consumed mostly by the target audience of people of the age of ...