Marketing Analysis of Watermelon Oreo Cookie Failure

Desklib offers solved assignments and past papers to help students succeed.

PRODUCT FAILURE
WATERMELON OREO

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................. 4
PRODUCT OVERVIEW.................................................................................................................5
EVALUATION OF BRAND............................................................................................................6
SITUATION ANALYSIS................................................................................................................. 7
METRICS OF SUCCESS.............................................................................................................. 12
MARKETING IMPLICATIONS.....................................................................................................13
CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................... 14
REFERENCES.................................................................................................................................15

INTRODUCTION
In this essay, the discussion will be held on a product launched by Oreo and will discuss how the
product failed in the market. The essay will cover the different areas of marketing and evaluate
the product on the basis of customer needs, target market, situation analysis and other similar
aspects. At last, the essay will identify the metrics of success and offers marketing implications
including the recommendation to the company about how the product would have been
produce differently to make it successful. The whole discussion will be held on a product or
brand naming “Watermelon Oreo”.

PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Oreo is a most popular brand lies in the category of a sandwich cookie. It usually consists of two
wafers with a sweet cream filling (Tepper, 2017). The Oreo cookies were introduced in March 6,
1912 in United States and made by Nabisco division of Mondelez International. The cookies are
popular across the world for its delicious taste and flavors (Tepper, 2017). As of 10 June 2013,
Oreo has come up with a new brand “Watermelon Oreo” with a flavor of watermelon. The
product was introduced by the company in 2013 with the purpose of creating a refreshing
summery watermelon flavored cookie, the essay will made the evaluation of the brand
performance and image in the last past years.
Failure of “Watermelon Oreo”
Oreo served its watermelon cookies in different areas of world including national and
international countries. At United States, the cookies sold at $3. It has been investigated that at
the initial stages, the watermelon Oreo is appreciated by more than half of the population due
to its unique flavor of watermelon and the rich green and pink crème filling between two bold
golden wafers. But as of now, the competitor of Oreo launched similar product with more
reliable features and low cost due to which, it leads to reduce the customers of Oreo
(Dijksterhuis, 2016).

EVALUATION OF BRAND
 Target market
Oreo aims at molding its Watermelon cookies to attract large number of consumers in the
emerging markets and for this, it have made huge investment in marketing to counter sales in
the developed countries (Dijksterhuis, 2016).
Oreo spokesperson Kimberly Fontes targeted children on the priority basis as they are very
curious to try new flavors of cookies. Also, it has targeted its stores in different locations across
United States. But unfortunately, the watermelon Oreo does not reaches to the customer
heart and its failure rate increased by 30-80 % and this endures that Oreo is facing marketing
problems with its product Watermelon Oreo (Song et al., 2016).
 Customer needs
The Watermelon flavored golden cookies is a summer snack launched with the purpose of
fitting in the needs of customer (Dijksterhuis, 2016). The company contemplates that these
cookies will surefire hit during the summer picnics. But, Oreo failed in recognizing the customer
needs and launched double flavored cookies which resulted to be a bad combination of flavors
(Song et al., 2016).

SITUATION ANALYSIS
The following factors will help in effectively analyzing the situation of Oreo and determine what
the circumstances that are faced by the company during analyzing the brand performance of its
Watermelon Oreo.
 what went wrong regarding market or industry
The watermelon cookies are not easily accessible for everyone as the company does not make a
reliable promotion of it. Thus, the product is hardly available in the market. As the company
highly targeted customers of US, the limited number of customers and stores decrease the
sales and lead to a product failure (Rosenberg and Tama, 2016). Oreo failed in choosing
accurate market and target customers.
 Competition
The Watermelon Oreo couldn’t satisfy the needs of the customers and thus failed in gaining
competitive advantages in the market. The competitors of Oreo have launched more effective
and tasty cookies just after the launch of Watermelon Oreo (Rosenberg and Tama, 2016). It
includes Britannia Bourbon, Sunfeast biscuits, Parle hide n seek etc. These products are much
better than the watermelon Oreo and thus the company failed in earning competitive
advantages over its competitors.
 Company capabilities
The company has the capability of bearing risk which is clearly shown by its rapid introductions
of new flavors and interesting tastes (Rosenberg and Tama, 2016). As the company is
associated with Cadbury, its brand image is already high and thus capable of inviting more
customers to buy its products.

 Positioning
The watermelon Oreo of Oreo Company positioned itself globally as a summer tasty snaker.
Oreo usually uses the emotional appeal to strengthen its watermelon Oreo as a combining
force between the parents and their small children. This strategy works as kids pester their
parents to buy them Oreo cookies (Baskin and Vecchio, 2018). But at the same time, the
company uses very poor or few promotion strategies to position its brand due to which it’s
Watermelon Oreo couldn’t reach to the audience worldwide and make its access difficult for
the customers (Baskin and Vecchio, 2018).

The 4Ps of marketing mix of Watermelon Oreo
 PRODUCT
The company created watermelon Oreo with the purpose of offering “fun summer flavor” in a
cookie. It has been found that these cookies consist of artificial flavor of watermelon along with
few food ingredients (Veloutsou, 2015). The cookies don’t taste like an actual organic
watermelon and also consist of seven scary ingredients including the high fructose corn syrup
and artificial color essence. Thus, the product is recognized to be linked with hyperactivity and
may cause attention and behavioral disorder for the children and its target market.
 PLACE
The Watermelon Oreo was launched at United States and also the company targeted stores of
US to sell the product. Oreo doesn’t make the proper use of network of Mondelez to distribute
its product worldwide. The marketing and sales team of Oreo must ensure that its Watermelon
Oreo sold out with proper distribution channel by applying the distribution strategy of
marketing mix (Veloutsou, 2015).
 PRICE
Oreo introduced many of its products with best and affordable rates and its Watermelon Oreo
cost $3 a box. Though the price of the cookies is affordable but its bad features and artificial
taste somewhere made it expensive and not worth to buy (Veloutsou, 2015). The reason of the

cheaper price of Watermelon Oreo is the usage of artificial colors and harmful food ingredients
in the cookies.
 PROMOTION
While analyzing the promotional strategies of Oreo, it has been found that the watermelon
cookies are not well promoted and applied just few promotion strategies. Due to which, the
customers are not fully attracted towards it (Byrn, 2018). The last time, the company also
launched a candy corn Oreo on which people laughed really hard. To get back in the market,
Nabisco brought Watermelon Oreo which unfortunately did not succeed too (Byrn, 2018). Also,
it includes stickers inside each cookie box to specially attract the kids but this promotion
strategy isn’t work for Oreo.

METRICS OF SUCCESS
Going through the metrics, the sales of watermelon Oreo indicates that the product has been
not sold as expected and does not matches the sales forecast of the company. The area on
which Oreo should focus on top is the satisfaction of the new as well as existing customers
(Petroski, 2018). This will help in earning more productivity and profitability for the business
and could increase the brand equity and brand image of the Watermelon Oreo (Petroski, 2018).
It has been recognized that the customers are not likely to purchase the watermelon cookies as
the usage of artificial colors and chemicals are located in the product (Petroski, 2018). The
Watermelon cookies of Oreo must be going flavor-happy while considering the health and
obesity factor on Top. Oreo should make use of organic watermelon with original flavors and
taste (Nyflot et al., 2015).

MARKETING IMPLICATIONS
Opportunity Analysis Template
Identified Opportunity
Supporting Factors (Strengths,
PEST Trends and Events,
Personal Interests)
Opposing Factors
(Weaknesses, PEST Trends
and Events)
Diversification of Market Affordable price Poor communication (Cleeren et
al., 2017)
Impulsive growth in the
emerging economies
Attract customers especially
children
Internal as well as External
competition
Growing demand for biscuits
and cookies
Attractive and colorful
packaging
Challenges in differentiation
(Cleeren et al., 2017)
Availability of strong
distributive channels
Strong association with
Cadbury
High cost of advertisement
It would be suggested and recommended to Oreo to develop effective features in its
watermelon cookies. First of all, the company should make a market research on the basis of
which the product should be produced (Cleeren et al., 2017). Oreo has the opportunity to
access the market and diversify its operations worldwide by assessing the strong distribution
channels. Oreo should not miss the opportunity of growing customer demands and also stands
successfully in terms of differentiating its products from the competitors (Cleeren et al., 2017).
Also, the company should improve its promotional strategy to diversify its brand awareness
among different countries.

CONCLUSION
The essay comes to a conclusion by evaluating that the Watermelon Cookies of Oreo failed in
the market as it consist of unhealthy ingredients and could not reach to the market widely. The
essay had shown the reasons of the failure of watermelon Oreo along with offering
recommendations for its improvements. The essay had deeply analyzed the 4Ps of Watermelon
Oreo which helped in recognizing the weaknesses in the product.