Executive summary:

Coffee-Mate is the market leader for coffee creamer in the UK market; it holds 55% of the market share. However, a high market penetration and a recent increase of Coffee-Mate’s competitors’ market share have led to a questioning on the brand’s future.
Several tools are used to describe and precise the competitive environment of the brand. The BCG analysis of the brand’s product portfolio highlights two issues:
• the uncertain future position of the current Star product: Coffee-Mate, and
• an interesting opportunity for the Coffee-Mate Lite product. This Question Mark product is present in a high growth market and could be shifted to a star position.
The environmental analysis, through the use of the SWOT tool, led to a clearer vision of Coffee Mate’s areas of competence and the areas that have to be improved. Coffee-Mate’s is a strong brand with a large advertising budget providing quality (and healthy with Coffee-Mate Lite) products. These strengths appear to be useful for breaking Coffee-Mate’s bad image of distress and poor taste product.
An analysis of the customer’s market segmentation, which divides the market in 5 consumers sections leads to a distinction between two different buying behaviours:
• cost constrained consumers who base their buying decision on prices; and
• a group of customers called “premium”, who are prepared to pay a premium price for quality products.
These BCG, SWOT and customer segmentation tools provide information about the brand portfolio, its environment and its consumers. Such knowledge of the brand is crucial to be guided in the decision making process. Thus, in order to enhance the market leadership of Coffee-Mate, the followings decisions have to be taken:
• set up a series of short term discounts, in order to attract the customers;
• promote the qualities of Coffee-Mate in the TV