Marketing Strategy for Topshop

This assignment provides a comprehensive marketing plan for Topshop, a fashion brand. The plan involves identifying the target market, creating a unique selling proposition, developing a pricing strategy, and selecting effective promotion channels. Additionally, it explores the interrelationship between marketing and other functional units to achieve organizational goals. A suitable budget is also allocated for various marketing activities.

MARKETING ESSENTIALS

INTRODUCTION
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling products or services through market
research and advertising (Atkinson, 2016). Report will include TOPSHOP as organisation,
TOPSHOP operates its business across the world and provides shows, cloths etc. many products.
Report will describe interrelationship between various functional units. This report also
discusses about, how marketing mix strategies helps in achieving the organisational objectives.
LO 1
a) Roles and Responsibilities of the Marketing Function of TOPSHOP Company
Marketing can be described as specialised activities to market product and services of
business.
Marketing Functions includes:
 Financing
 Product and Service Development
 Information Management
 Promotions
 Selling and Distribution.
The responsibilities are:
 Marketing function of Topshop is responsible for giving value/satisfaction to consumers
a steady supply at a reasonable price.
 It is responsible to achieving good customer relationship by giving exact information and
providing surveys either through mail or online to determine customer satisfaction.
 Product and service development responsible for updating, changing, and catering the
products to what the customer wants (Shaw, 2014).
 Selling is another responsibility of marketing Accordingly, Topshop provide free
personal style consultants, this helps and encourage costumers to make a purchase.
 Marketing function is responsible for Promoting products to the target audiences, which
are 18-30 years old (Moss, 2017).
b) Responsibilities of marketing in wider marketing atmosphere
Marketing Environment: there are various macro and micro factors that influence
performance of the firm. These are related to internal and external market position of enterprise.
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Micro concerns with the internal environment which are company organization, suppliers,
customers that have direct impact on business.
And Macro concerns with external environment which are political, economical, technological,
social, demographic sources (Malik, 2017).
Roles and Responsibilities are marketing in wider marketing environment as explained as
below:
 Develop marketing strategies and plan as to be successful in the marketing environment
 Coordinating with other departments to find solution and overcome with the
environmental issue.
 This is responsible to analyses market risk and making strategies accordingly so that risk
of business can be minimised (Sridevi and Kumar, 2015).
c) Relationship between marketing and other functional units
 Marketing and Human resource: Interrelationships between marketing and HR
will have the impact on the behaviour on the organisation like motivating the behaviour
of the employees and customer-contact which will impact the organisational
performance. Through marketing HR gets to know necessity to extra employees to fulfil
the market demand. Thus, human resource team hire skilled employees so that who can
deal with consumers well in market (Sato and et.al., 2018).
 Marketing and Finance: Marketing and finance departments need to work closely with
each other. Marketing is helpful in increasing cash flow and this flow of money supports
finance department in allocating budget to each activity. If allocation of resources is not
done carefully then marketing will not be sucessful. Thus, both have strong relationship
with each other (Petrescu and Lauer, 2017).
 Marketing and Operations/Productions: They are close interrelated to each other and
ensures that current and future needs are satisfied through planned research and
development. Marketing teams provides information about the quality and design
specifications laid down by customers so that production departments can manufacture
accordingly which increase the profitability to the TOP-SHOP and will also result in the
growth (Vukasovid, 2016).
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d) Critical evaluation of key elements of marketing
Interrelationship between Functional Units and marketing will gain the benefit of more
effective execution, higher productivity and innovations. It will help in improving the
performance by defining and promoting the brand and will help to achieve organisational goal,
but it also brings a challenge if they do not collaborate more often due to which there may arise a
communication gap that will result in lack of understanding and chances of conflict. A good
relationship will increase the sales volume and will bring profit to the organisation but an failures
will bring inter-organisational conflict between the two will result in decrease in the profits and
not achieving the targets and will blame each other for the failures (Arora, 2017). Close
collaboration between the two departments is vital and effective for fulfilment of the
organisational goals. They both constitute the key value adding areas of business organisation
but their relationship is often marked by fighting and hostility rather than partnership or co-
operation.
LO2
1) Marketing mix of TOPSHOP and H&M
7 P's TOPSHOP H&M
1) PRODUCT Topshop has applied the
strategy of product
differentiation it has 3
categories of product like
Topshop kitchen, Boutique,
Vintage and Nail Bar
(Gokhale, 2016).
H&M has applied the strategy
of innovations, it keeps on
innovating its products and
extremely fats and numerous
NPD cycles.
2) PROMOTIONS Topshop have used a digital
platforms to communicate with
the customers via Facebook
and online websites.
H&M have spent promotinal
efforts in outdoor marketing,
direct marketing ( Directly
Interacting with the customers)
3) PRICE Topshop have adopted
economic pricing strategy to
attract the customers by
H&M has applied competitive
pricing strategy by placing
their product at cheap price
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minimizing the cost of
marketing.
with the reasonable quality.
4) PLACE Topshop has adopted the
strategy of producer-customer
I.e the shortest channel of
distribution.
H&M has adopted the strategy
producer-Retailer-Customer I.e
the second level of channels of
distribution.
5) PEOPLE Topshop have applied the
strategy of rewards of
incentives in order to improve
their performance (Atkinson,
2016).
H&M have applied the
strategy to reward their
employees by achieving their
targets.
6) PROCESS The process of Topshop is not
smooth as customers has to
wait till its delivery date.
Its process is smooth as the
customers can make the
buying from its stores directly.
7) PHYSICAL EVIDENCE Topshop has a attractive
different brand logos and is
highly presentable for the
customers.
H&M its are highly attractive
and well organised to attract
the customers.
2) Tactics of organisation to meet organisational goal
TOPSHOPS objective is to achieve profitability by satisfy its customers. The tactics used
by TOPSHOP to achieve its business objective is that it has used the digital platforms so that
coordination through Facebook and online websites can be done easily. It is the fantastic
technique as it is the cost effective . TOPSHOP continusly brings innovation in its products and
services.This takes support of mobile application and socialmedia marketing in order topromotes
its products across the world. (Shaw, 2014). The brand has clear promotional strategy through
digital and social media.
TOPSHOP has put their products at affordable prices so that its products are available to the
wide range of people all around the world. As the customers are able to buy huge brand within
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the affordable prices such strategy has helped in achieving the objective of profitability by
putting their product has affordable prices (Petrescu and Lauer, 2017)
LO 3
1) Marketing plan
Marketing Objectives:
Associate brand with young entrepreneurs & executives through digital media, within a
year.
Swot Analysis:
Strength Weakness Opportunity Threat
 Wide variety
 Free personal
style consultant
 Competitive
pricing
 Experience of
marketing in
diverse culture
 High end quality
retailer- so it
will be
appealing to
those who are
willing to spend.
 Fast growing
demands from
Asian markets
 Targeting
market in
Pakistan.
 Economic
conditions are
not welcoming
with the
currency
depreciation
 Political
conditions in
Pakistan
markets are not
stable.
Marketing Strategy:
 Product- A up-to-date fashion brand that is uniquely designed for professionals.
 Price- The strategy is to provide products at affordable price, regular sales, and discount
cards.
 Promotion- Awareness trough hoardings, magazines, fashion shows and social media
 Place- Topshop stores are in all big cities as well as they have a great online site.
Segmentation, Positioning, Targeting:
Topshop's segmentation based on 4 parts i.e. demographic- age, gender, social class, culture.
Geographic- regional or national, urban or rural. Psycho-graphic- self concept, personality or
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lifestyle. Behavioural- brand loyalty extent of usage, usage situation. To correctly position they
must understand the perception of the consumer within the segment. And target the consumers
who fits in the segments (Gokhale, 2016).
Budget-
Heads Expenses(USD$) Duration
Market Research 1000 Per year
Website & SEO 200 Yearly
Print and Magazine 4000 Yearly
Hoardings 1000 Varying duration
SMM 3000 Per year
Mobile SMS 1500 Per year
Total Expenses 10700 Approximate figure
Monitoring and Controlling:
This process involves comparing actual performance with planned performance and
taking correct action to yield the desired outcome when significant differences exist.
2) Detailed coherent evidence – based marketing plan for an organization
Marketing plan uses social media marketing, In the recent time companies are at a point
where almost every one has a profile on social media and is engaged in it. There are more that 5
social media sites used by customers So its social marketing can be an effective marketing plan
for marketing. Through social media a company can remain updated with the marketing trend
and choice of the customers and can update its data from time to time accordingly. Entity can use
social media marketing through advertisements or creating videos (in trend nowadays) or
through post (Petrescu and Lauer, 2017). We have also used price skimming as a marketing
strategy. It is also an effective way of marketing as in this initial price of a product is high and
then it is lowered over time, so through this strategy we can attract customers over time and can
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be used as an effective way of marketing. By this way Top Shop becomes able to generate more
revenues and become able to gain competitive advantage.
CONCLUSION
Above study , articulates that the interrelationship between marketing and other
functional units increase the increase the probability of the TOPSHOP by applying various
marketing mix strategies and with the help of interrelationship between marketing and
functional units helps in achieving the organisational goals effectively and developing its brand
name and brand image.
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