Pocket Stylist - an Application Marketing Plan

Marketing Plan

1.0 Executive summary

Psychologist Dunlap (1928, p. 65) clarified that one of the reasons for people to wear garments is to secure preeminence or gain attention. Therefore, people concern about their clothing, for the sake of attracting others’ attention or raising confidence (O’Callaghan, 2014). This has prompted an interesting issue in our daily lives, that is how to wear in order to make ourselves look better? Based on a survey on 860 people aged from 18 to 52 in Kuala Lumpur, 68.3 % of the respondents are frustrated about their outfits everyday (Loi, Hassan, & Ramayah, 2016). Since this frustration is identified, it gives an idea for our company, Fashion X&Y Sdn Bhd, to establish a creative and practical application called Pocket Stylist to overcome this problem. Pocket Stylist is a brand new application targeting the Malaysian consumer market which recommends suitable and fashionable outfits for every individual through virtual fitting technology. Our target market will be customers aged from 16 to 51 years’ old who own smartphones or tablets. Although the concept of Pocket Stylist is very fresh in Malaysia, our company is still aware of some potential competitors. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are clearly identified in order to succeed in our target market. After identifying these internal and external factors, they are to be matched with our product development strategy that introduces a brand new service to the current Malaysian consumer market. It is confident that Pocket Stylist will attract a lot of people to try as it is free to download, alongside with a series of promotional activities. The objectives of these marketing strategies and activities are to build brand awareness and create more trial and engagement of Pocket Stylist.

2.0 Service Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Competition is everywhere in this technological society. Consumers are getting more and more difficult to satisfy, their needs and wants are changing. For a fairly new product here, we understand that in this current market we have quite a lot of competitors whether its indirect or direct, to survive in this market and initially becoming successful is not an easy task. Having a unique selling preposition today is considered one of the main elements that will determine whether a business will success. What is this unique selling preposition? It is a selling point which differentiates our products from our competitors. Without a unique selling prepositions, we will just be selling homogenous products which prevent us from being a successful business and consumers will not specifically come to us because there are so many similar products.

Our unique prepositions here are that our mobile application enables consumers to experience different things such as a 3D customizable character function. With this function we can say that “going to a fitting room is no longer necessary, just try it out on your Pocket Stylish”. Indirectly, we can assure that consumers can save up a lot of costs because it dramatically decreases the time needed to go out for shopping and trying new clothes in the fitting room. Why not just try the clothes in your mobile phone when you can just do it with a few touches on your phone. Everything has become handy, and also we make sure it is easy to use, simple to organise. Thus, we made a stance that we will be different from others.

Next, we believe everyone will always have a headache when it comes to outfits choices. This mobile application provided a fashion trend label and guidelines that generate information to consumers with the latest trending clothes and we organise various types of fashion style such as classics, sexy, rocker and more. It is safe to say that consumers no longer need to search on the internet or wonder what to wear, what is the latest trend. Again, we ensure consumers are able to enjoy convenient and accessible functions. Researches has been done on other same genre of mobile application, they do not provide such functions but some similar photos of latest model only.

In addition, with this mobile application, we will be able to form a wide business chains along with other cloth brands. As of today, creating a platform for people to interact together has become a very important and profitable thing. Just take a look at Facebook or Alibaba. We allow other brands to enter our apps, it will help them to higher up their sales and of course promote their products. We are able to target not only consumers but some business entities too. As a competitive advantage, we made some of our potential competitors as our business companion. Having more friends is always better than having more enemies.

After all, we make sure our application is able to gain attention once it launches with these unique selling prepositions. We understand that on a marketing points of view, it will be hard as a first step to achieve a lot of downloads. Thus, when we have analysed what they need or want and also we have what the others do not have, we are certain that our application will be very successful as a first steps of our business.

3.0 Market Overview

3.1 Customers Analysis

Firstly, segmenting the market is essential. Market segmentation refers to the process of dividing the whole market into different smaller customer segments based on geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral bases (Lynn, 2015). In order to identify smaller and better defined market segments, our company will segment the entire market based on demographic and behavioral variables. Three segmented customers are potential to be our target customers, they are customers aged from 16 to 70 years old, in every income level groups and can get access to use Internet.

Next, our company will choose the most attractive segment to target. Target market is a set of customers who have homogeneous features and needs that a company decide to serve (Porta, 2015). Thus, our company will target customers aged from 16 to 51 years old and come from low to upper middle income group, who own smartphone or tablet. This group of customers is the most attractive, because its size is estimated to account for 69.5% of all Malaysians in 2016 (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2015) and according to a survey of PricewaterhouseCoopers (2016), 54 % of people aged from 18 to 56 years old purchase products online on weekly basis, and most of them come from low to upper middle income groups.

Individual marketing will be our market targeting strategy. Individual marketing is included in micromarketing which refers to the customization of products and marketing programs to fit the preferences of individual customers (Edwards, 2016). Pocket Stylist will recommend appropriate outfits to every individual with different body sizes, skin colors and preferences, thus a one-to-one marketing strategy is required.

To posit Pocket Stylist in our target customers’ minds, our company clearly define our competitive advantages. Our company wants our target customers to define Pocket Stylist as their “portable stylists”,