Assignment 5.1 Company Basics and Target Markets
Lennart Fleschhut
Company’s name: PolarInstant
1. PolarInstant is a company that provides the possibility to turn “normal” digital pictures into old, vintage Polaroid looking printed pictures. The name is set together by Polaroid, which used to be a possibility to take pictures and get them instantly printed. This contains the second part of the name, which is instant. In modern times old Polaroid cameras are really rare and, in case you are lucky to still have on, really hard and costly to maintain them. But there is a trend among young people up to middle-aged people around 35-45 to seek for those kinds of pictures. Although really high-class single lens reflex camera pictures offer really real and detailed pictures, more and more people seem to prefer the style of old pictures they see on old pictures of their parents or even grandparents.
One can see that for example by the success of Instagram, which offers the possibility to change the style of pictures and share them with your friends online.
PolarInstant’s headquarter and Labs will be located in San Francisco and the services it offers will be available through the Internet on www.polarinstant.com.
People will upload their pictures and then change the style of their picture, where they can choose from various styles, which are of course really authentical, as the company has analysed thousands of old pictures to provide the widest range of possibilities possible.
If they want to, they can share their pictures with other costumer’s and talk about their pictures and our offer.
PolarInstant’s competitive advantage is that it’s unique in its kind. Of course there are various possibilities nowadays to print digital pictures, at retailer stores like Walgreens, or even at home. But none of these possibilities offers the outlook of pictures PolarInstant offers, which includes of course the typical white frame.
2. Mission Statement: Our world is full of pictures. There are pictures of everything and everyone. And people keep taking pictures of everything and everyone. People have thousands of pictures on their computers and forget about most of them. But where is the authenticity pictures used to have? We bring it back. We offer you the possibility to not only print your latest pictures. We offer you unique and one of a kind pictures.
We offer you memories.
3. Goals: (Due date: 1.7.2013) 1. Around 10000-12000 clicks on the Website in the first sixth month. 2. Around 8-10000 prints in the first six months. 3. Get around 5000 likes in the first six month on Facebook.
4. Target audience/segments: I would differentiate the final segments by psychographic, age and benefit segmentation. So the target market would be people between 15 and 45, who are mainly represented in social networks. They have furthermore a little interest in photography and have some bearing on old-fashioned stuff. One can divide those into two groups.
The young people from 16 to about 30, who know what polaroid is, but never really had one of those cameras. They want to be different and distinguish themselves from others through their style, interests and their behavior.
The second one are older people from 30 to around 45, who probably grew up with those cameras but didn’t manage to maintain one of those and now seek to have a possibility to have their pictures this old-fashioned way.
Both those segments are rather wealthy, which doesn’t mean that they have to be super rich, but that our product is rather for people who really have the money on such gadgets, which are not really necessary in daily life. That’s why people who need to have an eye on every dollar they spend are not part of our target audience.
5. Messages: segment one: - our offer is something different and outstanding * make your pictures one of a kind, like you are * having a nice picture of a special moment on your PC is not the same than having a vintage, printed version of it
segment two: - you know the special feeling of polaroid pictures * bring your childhood memories back to life * offer your child(ren) the same memorable, one of a kind, pictures, they can look at years from now, just like you do with old pictures
6. Types of Media: For PolarInstant I would consider two major ways of spreading our service offer.
The first one would be Facebook. The target audience we considered earlier is spending a huge amount of their time on the Internet and on Facebook. They use Facebook as a communication medium, which would spread the word of this service really fast.
I think it is a really fast and at the same time really cheap way to make a start in spreading our service.
The next step would be printed Ads in selected magazines and also on the websites of these magazines. For this way I would choose about 3 to 5 magazines for each segment.
These could be lifestyle magazines, as well as photography or music magazines.
Depending on the budget I would further on consider interactive Advertising on bus or train stations. People could connect with the Ad through their Smartphone and get the possibility to make a free try with one of their pictures and perhaps sent it to their home as postcards, still depending on the budget. As it is a new growing company I would consider the last step as rather unrealistic.
