Real life Case Study – Distributor’s Business in Tanzania

Mr. John from ABC Ltd, Tanzania is an exclusive distributor of JJ India Ltd since last 20 years in Tanzania.

JJ India Ltd. is a well-known and established brand in the field of industrial consumables. Mr. John have been doing a decent business with JJ India Ltd, Importing industrial consumables from JJ India Ltd to Tanzania and selling it to his customers. His business with JJ India Ltd have been grown in decent pace, He has introduced various new products from JJ India Ltd to Tanzania market and grown the business successfully.

Mr. John is operating with a decent gross margin of 25% in his market since last few years (Till the year 2015), which is very lucrative to stay into the business.

Tanzanian Currency (TZS) have been devalued against US Dollar (USD) from year 2015 to 2016 by 30 %. (From 1700 TZS per USD in 2015 to 2200 TZS per USD in 2016) . Therefore Mr John’s import prices have gone up.

With higher manufacturing cost JJ India Ltd. was not able to pass on the extra discount to ABC Ltd to make Mr. John stable into the business.

New product development

   In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) is the complete process of bringing a new product to market.

New product development is described in the literature as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale and it can be tangible or intangible. A good understanding of customer needs and wants, the competitive environment and the nature of the market represent the top required factors for the success of a new product. Cost, time and quality are the main variables that drive the customer needs. Aimed at these three variables, companies develop continuous practices and strategies to better satisfy the customer requirements and increase their market share by a regular development of new products. The use of best practices and the elimination of barriers to communication are the main concerns for the management of NPD process.

There have been a number of approaches proposed for analyzing and responding to the marketing challenges of new product development. Two of these are the eight stages process of Koen and a process known as the fuzzy front end.

A.      The eight stages

4A’s of Marketing

We all know about the 4P’s Model of marketing mix, Despite its popularity and longevity, the 4P’s model has been criticized for various reasons.
One frequent criticism is that the 4P’s focus on the product or the selling organization rather than on the customer.
To understand what is required to achieve success with customers, marketers need other tools to complement the 4P’s model. One of these important complementary tools is known as the 4A model of marketing.
The 4A model was developed by Jagdish Sheth, a marketing professor at Emory University, and Dr. Rajendra Sisodia, a marketing professor at Bentley University. Professors Sheth and Sisodia acknowledge that their 4A model was inspired by a similar marketing framework that Coca-Cola used successfully for many years.
The diagram below depicts the structure of the 4A model. As this diagram shows, the major components of the 4A framework are Acceptability, Affordability, Accessibility, and Awareness, and each of these elements has two dimensions. The components of the 4A model are a set of conditions that must be fulfilled to achieve success with any given product or service offering. To use a food analogy, the 4P’s describe the raw ingredients available to the chef, and the 4A’s describe the attributes of meals that will delight a given set of diners.

Components of the 4A Model