Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Thanks for the advice, I would like to elaborate some more on what you said and see what else might transpire. With regards to buying behaviors, I can break it down to 3 levels initially, I say initially because with the government caps ect., the buying behavior shifts resulting in a shift in target market. Let me explain. With imposed restrictions from government my target market is infused with black market dealers, B2B entities, street vendors and low to medium income families. The first two are illegal customers as they are not allowed to buy from retail stores the second two are eligible to walk into any retail store and buy off the shelf. Now for all intense purposes let us look at just the last two the legal ones.

The hawker foods are broken into different cultures, Chinese, Indian and local Mala; our oil attracts the last two. Basically the hawkers are very price sensitive and will generally reuse the oil to its maximum usage. The next group is the families low to medium income families, they too are price sensitive but also brand sensitive to a certain degree.

Consumption level, low income families use palm oil on everything regardless of health issues. Medium families will generally use palm oil in the same way but incorporate some healthier oil in some foods such as olive oil or sunflower. Higher income families will only use palm oil when frying food or festival celebrations when local traditional food is in order. Chinese group tend to use palm oil sesame seed blend which is a total different category therefore this target group will only purchase regular palm oil (ours) when wanting to create local food of Malaysia.

Our brand attracts: This is where it gets tricky. Our brand is up in the air, of the three target groups we are considered neutral with the market group, this is the case because of government restrictions limiting our market activities. Furthermore, our brand does not lean towards any of the groups, where the others phonetically lend themselves to those groups.

Summing up everything, I understand further research on the market group could be useful, however let me take this a step forward and request from anyone who reads this, what tactics and strategy you would use in order to build a market name for your brand under the government restrictions and upon lifting of government restrictions. Instinctively I would gear my marketing $ on Malay as they are the majority in this country, however my gut feeling tells me to have a 2 tier approach primary and secondary scope of which primary I would focus the brand on local majority group malay and secondary try to keep the brand as an oil for the masses.

I welcome any and all comments.

Regards,