Principles of Marketing: Creating Offerings, Marketing Channels, and Pricing Strategy

Running head: PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING
PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING
Part 1: Creating Offerings
Offering:
The supermarket chain Lidl offers quality product with affordable pricing. The product
offering of Lidl is considered as one of the affordable among other supermarket chains. Lidl
is following economy-pricing strategy by adopting ‘no frills strategy’ (Asche et al., 2015).
Lidl does not believes in investing in marketing and promotional strategies, they promote the
discounted offers as in store advertising and through their websites. Lidl exhibits their
symbolic colors, yellow and blue in the surrounding areas of the stores so that customers can
develop brand recognition and be aware of the nearby store. Although, Lidl offers products at
affordable price but 90% of their product range is focused on their in house brand with fewer
product options in a single category. The service offering of Lidl is concentrated in providing
assistance at store level and through their customer service facility in Lidl websites
(lidl.co.uk, 2019). They believe in providing valuable assistance to the customers visiting the
store about the availability of stock, product alternatives and at billing counters. The store
design reflects a traditional alignment of products for the convenience of the consumers. Lidl
understands that their target customers can be busy for which they incorporate store
efficiency in all their stores by implementing a similar intuitive layout, which makes the
search easier (lidl.co.uk, 2019). Lidl is not just a food offering supermarket their offerings
also focuses on the kitchen gadgets , gardening supplies, power tools and products in almost
every household category (Pechey & Monsivais, 2015). Lidl also follow various strategies to
minimize the cost of business operations. The strategies like ‘bring your own bag’ which
reflects various aspects of an effective strategy as it decrease the cost of manufacturing or
sourcing bags, saves time at the billing counter and is an approach towards sustainability
(Tench & Topić, 2017). Moreover, the products in Lidl are displayed in the custom boxes,
which minimizes the shelving time. All these strategies reflects on the affordable pricing of
the products (Schmid et al., 2018). Lidl is more of a product dominance business with

2PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING
attached services (lidl.co.uk, 2019). The tangible factors of Lidl offering are products,
infrastructure and intangible factors includes customer service in websites and in store
services.
Type of consumer offering:
The four types of consumer offering includes:
 Convenience products
 Shopping products
 Specialty products
 Unsought products.
Convenience Shopping Specialty Unsought
Customer
buying behavior
Lower customer
involvement, frequent
purchase, minimum efforts
for planning and
comparison for product
selection
More effort in the
decision of price, quality
and brand, less frequent
purchase.
Special effort in
the purchasing
decision, brand
loyalty, price
sensitivity is low
and low
comparison of
brands.
Customer
awareness is low
which leads to
lower interest.
Price Low price High price High price varies
Distribution Widespread distribution
with convenient
availability
Selective distribution. Exclusive
distribution
Varies