Free Custom «Nesquik Marketing» Essay Paper

Nesquik is a brand of Nestle which has been highly popular among children and the health conscious American market. With Nestle’s ground set firm all around the world, Nesquik has met with delightful fame in many countries with-out-of-the-box creativity in advertising, fine positioning and portfolio management. But shortfalls are everywhere and challenges never come to rest even for a company like Nestle. Nesquik first appeared in the retail stores for children’s healthy drinking habits in 1948 and since then though has made the company encounter several challenges to create a name in the market, has been on the toll of success. Nesquik spells energy, enthusiasm and speed in children which only comes from healthy drinks. Nesquik has the brand persona of energy and health, with speed being infused further by the latest marketing outdoor campaign with the title of ‘on the go’ for Nesquik’s Ready to Drink. Over the years with continuous innovations in packaging and design, Nesquik has been providing a big alternative for conventional milk which children rather deviate from drinking. Nesquik’s flavored milk on the other hand with the use of cartoon characters such as a Bunny telling them to energize with Nesquik, children highly favor and love this brand of powdered milk. With several flavors, and types for different target audiences, such as young males or females, or both, Nesquik has not been shy in employing new and advanced means of advertising to get its message through in the most effective way possible. Nestle realizes the intense competition but to lead in the market of dairy products and healthy foods, it makes effective use of the channels of communication that allow a direct hit on the target audience for Nesquik that is mostly children of the ages of 5 and 14. But Nestle for Nesquik has not been immune to the challenging and ever changing market dynamics due to changing consumer preferences, for that based upon an extensive analysis of the marketing plan for Nesquik that Nestle has had over the years, one comes to bring about some solutions to counter challenges.

Positioning of Nesquik

Nesquik is positioned based on lifestyle and demographics, whereby using psychographic and demographic means of segmentation. It is for the children and young teenagers from the ages of 5 and 14, who are in need of constant energy, and thus milk. Nesquik uses the color of yellow and blue to emphasis on the energy and soothing taste of the milk that it offers to children of all ages. Nesquik’s ready to Drink, however is for a male target market that needs quick energy with constant involvement in sports activities. Following defines the target market of Nesquik.

Occupation: Students, children

Income Group: middle and upper middle class income group

Personality: energy seeking children who prefer flavored milk over pure milk

Lifestyle: highly involved in normal childhood activities, active children mostly.

Benefit: seeking energy and good, sweet taste that comes with milk, that they can use as a drink rather than milk

Using the above outlined target customer profile one can easily assess that Nesquik uses the demographic, psychographic, and benefits sought basis of segmentation for its brand.

Demographic Basis of Segmentation

Demography refers to the vital and measurable statistics of a population. Demographic characteristics such as age, sex, marital status, income, occupation, and education are most often used as the basis for market segmentation. Demographics help to locate a target market, whereas psychographic and socio-cultural characteristics help to describe how its members think and how they feel, like the target customers of Nesquik are rather active, children who are engaged in studies, sports and other physical activities that demands energy. Demographic information is often the most accessible and cost effective way to identify the target market. Indeed, most secondary data including census data are expressed in demographic terms. Demographics are easier to measure than other segmentation variables; they are invariably included in psychographic and sociocultural segmentation because they first locate the target market.

Product interests often vary with consumers’ age. Nestle recognizes that the age that is most suitable for the use of its products is the youth and children that is most energetic and has the time and physical capability to engage into sports and use the food to gain energy to run, race, jump. Age, especially chronological age implies a number of underlying forces. In particular demographers have drawn an important distinction between age effects (occurrences de to chronological age) and cohort effects (occurrences due to growing up during a specific time period). Such as the interest to play outside and consumer more energy develops when the child starts on taking regular people food and not baby foods, that is when Nesquik comes in around the age of five to develop the habit of drinking flavored milk along with the conventional milk.

On the other hand education, income and occupation tend to be closely correlated in almost a cause-and-effect relationship. Medium and high income groups have the sufficient income at hand to develop the habits of healthy eating and drinking. This is the case of the mothers or fathers who buy the brand for their children.

Psychographic Basis of Segmentation

The other highly important segmentation basis that Nesquik has employed is the psychographic basis of segmentation. The psychographic profile of a consumer segment can be thought of as a composite of consumers’ measured activities, interests and opinions (AIOs). As an approach to constructing consumer psychographic profiles, AIO research seeks consumer responses to a large number of statements that measure activities (how consumers’ family spends time, e.g. camping, volunteering at a local hospital, going to baseball games), interests (how the consumer feels about a wide variety of events and political issues, social issues, the state of the economy, ecology). Psychographic segmentation identifies the consumer’s personality, buying motives, interests, attitudes, beliefs, and values which are highly crucial in the attempt to match their psychographic traits with that of the brand’s features and persona (Keaveny, 1997).

Benefits Sought Basis of Segmentation

Marketing and advertising executives constantly attempt to identify the one most important benefit of their product or service that will be most meaningful to consumers. Nesquik uses the benefits of energy, and health with delicious tastes to allow those audiences to be attracted who highly favor non-conventional yet healthy means of eating and with a growing number of Americans becoming health conscious, this presents a rather sustainable positioning strategy for Nesquick.

But too much emphasis on health and quick drinking, as they are doing currently for Ready to Drink, may move away from the core benefit that the brand has to offer and that is its quality and taste which is by far the most important element why children prefer it for. Nesquik is a brand that can be positioned for the children as well as for the young adults and teenagers who love to drink milk but dislike its original tasteless flavor.

Advertising of Nesquik

Nesquik by far has been using the most creative form of advertising for the milk. From billboards to online games, there is no end to how Nesquik tries to reach its audience. But the question is: is it working? But before jumping onto that, it is wise to first consider how they are advertising.

Outdoor Advertising

Nesquik has had a tremendous marketing campaign for Ready to Drink based on outdoor advertising, with billboards on roads, on buildings, covered up buses and vans, all based outdoors to attract the attention of all those impulse buyers who get attracted with the colorful and attractive designs of the boards and with the pictures of the prodct that is just mouth-watering along with the cartoon character that has long been associated with the brand, ever since its inception.

Digital Advertising

Nesquik invested £8m for its digital advertising campaign with contracts with Disney Channel to advertise the brand on websites, channel, during programs, via conventional means or advance modern means, through games, through associations with merchandise of Disney. There was practically no end to this promotional stunt that was pulled by Nesquik, a drink that children love with the channel and the phenomenon as Disney that children and even adults of all ages love. With ‘Morphy’ the bunny bouncing out of websites and webpages, children got bound to be involved with the cartoon adventures of the characters in the advertisements of Nesquik. This digital advertising allowed the children to become highly involved in the brand and what it stands for and thus making the image more vivid and unforgettable as ever.

Internet Advertising

Online quizzes to the very recent have been catching the attention of children towards Nesquik via its website and several other websites of channels and other entertainment ones which it has endorsements with.

The advertising has met with great response but the imedia agencies do criticize whether digital media is the most effective medium to reach out to the target market. Also, the use of internet is also not so viable, as the children that Nesquik targets are mostly underage and not too wide open for internet’s massive exposure owing to parent’s restrictions on accessing all forms of websites. But billboards and channels are the best means to advertise Nesquik, which are the only two means it has been employing for Asian countries over the recent years.