Marketing Strategy Workshop: Mizuno Running Shoes
As a marketing professional myself, doing hypothetical work helps stretch my brain in new ways and satisfy a creative outlet. For example, most of the work I do on a day-to-day basis in B2C (business to consumer) for health care insurance for B2B (business to business) through my consulting work.
I use Mizunos Running Shoes myself (Wave Riders) and loved them. They were fitted for my feet and won out against Hokas, Clouds, Nike’s and other big name brands.
For this month’s marketing strategy workshop, we are hypothetically marketing specialists for Mizuno Running Shoes. Our Director of Marketing has tasked us with increasing summer sales for women’s running shoes. So today, we will walk through the marketing strategy. NOTE: This is not the marketing plan, that is actually something entirely different. In these workshops, we focus on the strategic positioning and definitions.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: The Marketing Mix.
The marketing mix includes Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Leveraging publicly available information and surface level research, let’s define the marketing mix. (Note: If you were an internal employee this would be much larger because you’d have much more information readily available).
Product: What does Mizuno sell?
For the sake of this workshop, we’re only focusing on women’s running shoes.
Price
Women’s running shoes range from ~$84.00 - $250.00 US.
Place
You can purchase online on the Mizuno website, Amazon or online retailers. You can also purchase in-person at sport retailers such as DICKS Sporting Goods, Footlocker and Fleets Feet, or merchandise retailers such as Target and DSW Shoes.
Promotion: How does Mizuno promote women’s running shoes?
Google Search, Display, Shopping Ads, Social Media, Influencer Marketing, Email Marketing
Step 2: Define your objective.
Our objective is: Objectives: Increase sales of womens running shoes by 20% YOY (year over year) for the third quarter of Mizuno’s fiscal year (July-September).
Step 3: Determine the budget.
Likely this would come from your “higher-ups”, or leadership team. For the sake of our hypothetical, we’ll say we got $1,600,000 in budget for Q3.
Step 4: Perform a SWOT analysis.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Strengths: High quality product, great company reputation both current state + historically, high retention rate, largely repeat purchasers, tend to attract an older population who regularly refreshes shoes and will likely be purchasing in summer
Weaknesses: Lower social presence/brand awareness than competitors, brand aesthetic to appeal to women, tend to only work with female influencers who are professional runners
Opportunities: Incorporate minimalistic design to match trends women gravitate towards, consult with female influencers who strictly run for fun, get involved in community events targeted towards women throughout USA
Threats: Internal teams tend to be risk averse
Step 5: Targeting + Positioning
For this piece of the strategy, you’ll want to outline things such as demographics, psychographics, lifestyle habits and purchasing behaviors. For example:
Demographics: Young single women living in affluent counties in the United States, young couples with a shared income in the United States
Psychographics: Young single women who are learning how to run, young couples who enjoy running together outdoors
Lifestyle Habits: Young single women working from home, young couples who start their day with an outdoor run and end it with an outdoor walk, might own a dog, live in an apartment (rental income)
Behaviors: Influencer marketing has large impact on purchasing decisions, tends to spend disposable income on hobbies, clothing and travel
And of course, we don’t want to forget about our repeat customers. So I would also propose another leg of the marketing strategy for retention. This would be fleshed out in a marketing plan, but I would envision something like an email to repeat purchasers with a 20% discount code as a thank you.
Step 6: Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
The final part of the marketing strategy is determining what you want to track. This will be very general, because your marketing plan is where you will define more specific KPI’s like open rate, influencer marketing conversion rate, etc.
For our Mizuno campaign, we might track Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Cost Per Lead, Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion.
