Recommendations: Datril is suggested to position Datril as the alternative to aspirin. Such a positioning will be able to attract current aspirin customers to Datril. The marketing campaign should focus on physicians, trade and patients. It should stress the information of little side effects compared to other analgesic medicine. Both the retail price and the trade price should be lower than Tylenol. Segmentation and targeting: Datril should target on aspirin users. ?Datril potential clients could be 1) people currently using aspirin 2) people currently using Tylenol 3) new patients who are looking for analgesic medicine.
?People using aspirin are more price sensitive and have a high bearing point for side effects. People currently using Tylenol are relatively less price sensitive and have a lower bearing point for side effects. They are also more likely to listen to the suggestion by physicians. ?Datril has no aspirin side effect and is a fast and effective pain relief, just as what Tylenol could offer to patients. In other word, it is not able to distinguish from Tylenol in terms of functional value.
Patients who have been using Tylenol are more likely psychologically to stick to a familiar brand of medicine that is suggested by their physicians instead of adopting something new. ?Though the acetaminophen market is growing more rapidly, aspirin will still take up a great portion of the analgesic market for a long time but with a relatively diminishing portion. (Exhibit 1) Positioning and offering: ?Datril is suggested to leverage on its established brand awareness in aspirin-based products and emphasizing on little side-effect as opposed to aspirin-based products when using TV commercials for promotion.
This would bring functional value to current aspirin users. ?If Datril adopts the low-priced alternative, considering the $6 million expenditure on advertisement, it would need to sell 13 million bottles (approximately 3% of the sales quantity of aspirin) in order to break-even, an achievable target. (Exhibit 2) ? The low-priced alternative also brings monetary value to aspirin users who might consider shifting to acetaminophen medicine because of the side-effect of aspirin. ?As patients still rely heavily on professional opinion in terms of medicine, pharmacies and physicians play an important role in influencing the choice of patients.
By lowering the trade price, pharmacies and other retailers would have a larger margin selling Datril than Tylenol thus would be able to help promote sales of Datril. Other considerations: ?Datril should not be associated with brands familiar to customers such as Bufferin or Excedrin as this will cause confusion of Datril’s function to be similar to aspirin. ?Datril should not be seen as substitute of Tylenol because it will not be able to bring out the value (less side-effect) it could bring to patients.