United Cereal
1-As Lora Brill, UC’s European VP, would you authorize Jean-Luc Michel’s request to launch of Healthy Berry Crunch in France?
Best services for writing your paper according to Trustpilot
An offering made by Jean-Luc Michel which is UC’s French manager suggested to Lora Brill who is the VP of the United Cereal requested whether HBC should enter the French market. Michel saw this opportunity after when in UK after the Special K with freeze-dried strawberries are launched and continued with the Cereal Partners launched the Berry Burst Cheerios the interest for healthy breakfast has grown. Moreover, he emerges that after the entrance of Special K in France and the interest it got from customer segments Michel thought they should take a step before any company such as Cereal Partners enter the French market. Looking from Brills perspective we can clearly say that there are significantly more pros than cons in this current proposal. French market does have an interest in healthy food that makes the possibility of the healthy breakfast product to survive in their market. For a long time there has been one known company in France that has been on the market for cereal that is Kellogg’s special K with strawberries. Furthermore, this leads to very little competition among the market for a new entrant and will be able to create a competitive advantage for their selves. Launching HBC in Europe would meet the approach of United Cereal for reorganizing the operations and product environment in Europe while profiting from savings around 10 to 15 percent of the overall costs in Europe. Another, aspect of United Cereal is that they are known for their innovations in the market and launching the HBC will allow them to gain the market as an innovator. Also facts are a important aspect to enter the market and looking at the percentages of HBC BlueBerry kind is pretty high for example results illustrates that they already have a 64% of the population is willing to buy this product. Which is a high range that doesn’t really have a risk. Also, United Cereal reached to a bigger shipping size than they forecasted which is 40%. From the cons side as mentioned earlier about the Berry Burst Cheerios that has been in the UK market and got a attention from the healthy breakfast customer segment. They heard a rumor that Cereal Partners is planning to launch Berry Burst Cheerios in France. If this rumor is true this could have very bad impacts on the Healthy Berry Crunch sales and things wouldn’t go as planned because they are a more known company, which can lead to customers preferring Cheerios over HBC. In addition to this if United Cereal doesn’t a have a solid plan to make sure they wont get hurt from this unexpected problem they may face some difficulties.
2- What do you think of Brill’s Euroband proposals? Should she authorize the launch of Healthy Berry Crunch as the Euroband? What concerns do you have? How would you resolve them?
Eurobrand is a strategy for product marketing for Europe-based strategy that helps to improve the products for UC. Moreover, standardizing; products, marketing, promotion and advertising around Europe is a market potential benefit for UC in terms of product similarity may be illustrated. Since consumers preferences are changing in the same direction and their old habits are vanishing with the conclusion of eliminating the market variances. But this fact doesn’t really prove that HBC will be a favorable or a preferable cereal all across Europe. The negative side of this approach is that the company wouldn’t be aware of what the customers wants and won’t shape according to their needs. Furthermore, this will lead to a value loss of the ”The UC Way” which one of the important values that they cherished is ”listen to the customer”. If they do not attempt the idea that whether the Europe wants this product or not they will have know after the sales and will lead to a profit loss. Only the cost of launching this product in France is 20 million dollars that is over the expected budget that Lora Brill has set. However, looking it on the positive scale the UC will be able to lower the product development and marketing costs by the percentage of 10 to 15 in a three years period. Moreover, if this innovative concept strategy goes as planned then they could also increase brand awareness leading to a competitive advantage. Growing the company consequently leads to a change, which is having more responsibility from the mangers that they have worldwide. This expansion will require more cross-country communications that will help the employees to work as a team to make United Cereal a place in the Europe market. In addition to this they need to make some structural changes in the organization to support the Eurobrand. UC has to be more flexible for the management structure to be able to familiarize the different countries and their cultures. So long story shot I argue that this will be a good idea to launch Eurobrand.
3- How might UC implement your recommendations? What do you think of the Eurobrand Team proposal?
Different approaches and recommendations could be given to UC. The first step that they should take should be is restructuring the organizational and also considering the strategic considerations. So in the past they have witnessed a failure with the European fruit juice strategy and they should definitely improve their attitude towards the market. Furthermore, to have a better point of view what should we be providing to customers the company should have a better idea of what to give them. So in the light of this statement they should receive feedbacks to have a more realistic view of what the customer needs. So the specific implementations could be said as ;
• Creation of Eurobrand team with much more responsibilities to be sure they have an effective communication cross-country wise. These kind of interactions will affect the companies efficiency since every one is in a positive interaction and will have a certain solid value.
• The company did face some failures in the past but these incidents happen so that the company won’t redo the mistake in the future. Everyone in the company should be aware of these failures and what was the problem of these certain failures. (frozen juice product)
• Testing Eurobrand in France and seeing how will it compete with the brand by Cereal partners Cheerios. ?llustrating how these two will compete.
• Support by CM with making sure that they are convinced about that they will have an input in the Eurobrand teams and their authority will remain constant
Their approach for now is the Eurobrand and if they succeed in France than they will spread to different European countries such as Germany. Moreover, Brill conducted a idea of Eurobrand Teams which will be European wide. These teams will be responsible of making sure the brand is doing their beast under the needs of customers of the country subsidiary that is selling the product. They are planning what kind of product should be in the market or marketing position, advertising etc. to increase their profits and reduce their costs. This plan will lead to many advantages such as all teams are modeled on the ETT that had prove to be operative in the previous time period. This tactic may also help for the resources usage in the best possible direction with coordination and control. In my point of view this idea would be very effective for the organizational structure with a huge improvement among communication and teamwork. This approach will be successful for the company interms of having the same values all round and also feeling connected to your company and your co-workers.
