HR CLOUD TECHNOLOGY 7 HR Cloud Technology Student Name University Affiliation Instructor’s Name Explain how the marketing plan targets the market segment HR cloud technology is becoming a basic requirement for most companies within the consumer goods industry. The industry is mainly composed of firms which deal in food production, beverages, clothing, electronics, and automobiles, among other major goods directly purchased by customers. The marketing plan, therefore, targets the market segment by showing the major reasons why HR cloud technology is significant in the consumer goods industry through conducting a needs analysis. Most of the activities in which the consumer industry companies engage in require a centralized location from which various HR functions should be conducted. Cloud computing technology provides the best platform to ensure there is consumer satisfaction, effectiveness in sales and also better employee engagement that is crucial to the success of various organizations (Buyya & Venugopal, 2008). Provide a positioning statement for your project The HR cloud technology will be a combination of both customer and employee information system. In many occasions, organizations only have a cloud technology which strictly deals with matters associated with the employees. Others will strictly have information related to customers, but fail to show the link between the two. For this project, both customers and employees are crucial to the success of an organization. If employees are not happy, there is a likelihood they will interfere with service delivery to the customers (Graham, 2008). With this HR cloud technology, firms will be able to see the interactions between customers and the employees. In addition to that, the management of employees will become easier as all data will be centralized within one system. Management of customers will as well be made better due to the centralization of all consumer data. The project, therefore, aims at providing an efficient system for the management of employees and customers and also provides the opportunity for the organization to have a better view of the relationship between employees and customers, who form part of major stakeholders within organizations. Define the products and services you will offer The main product that will be offered is the HR Cloud software in which various firms in the consumer industry will have to purchase. Once the product has been purchased, there are different services the company will offer. For instances, constant improvement of the software is expected; firms will thus be charged with the role of downloading updates to ensure their software is working in the best manner possible. The project will also offer security services to the different firms that will acquire the HR Cloud technology. The shift to the internet and web-based activities have attracted various issues related to security. Hacking among other cyber related crimes has drastically increased hence the need for security services for such software. The company will, therefore, be constantly monitoring the systems to ensure there no chances for unwanted parties to access information stored in the databases. In case the software develops problems, the company will have a way to respond to issues from the clients and also provide repair services depending on the situation. Develop and detail a pricing strategy you will use Pricing strategy plays an important role in the determination of the success of a product. The target market has a major influence on the kind of pricing strategy a firm adapts. If the firm, for instance, has its target market as people in the high socioeconomic class, then premium pricing would be the best pricing strategy to use. People in such economic status are associated with expensive commodities and may not be interested in cheap products despite the fact they can satisfy their needs. In this case, the product in question has firms in the consumer industry as the target market. As it is known, most organizations strive to reduce their expenses while ensuring they gain as much revenue as possible. Secondly, there are organizations already within the market who are also vendors of cloud technology. The best pricing strategy that should be embraced in this case is penetration pricing, which is significant for organizations striving to create a market share. As the name suggests, penetration pricing involves setting low prices, which acts as the main attraction to clients for the product or service offered by an organization (Hinterhuber, 2008). With penetration marketing, the product could gain a large market share within a short period, especially if the product is of high quality and effectively provides solutions to the various clients’ needs. In addition to penetration marketing, the project also focuses on price skimming, which will come once the company has gained a sizeable market share. Price skimming is a strategy where goods are charged higher due to the competitive advantage they have against other similar products in the market. The HR cloud computing technology proposed by this company will not only be software for employee management but will also have features for customer management. This is a unique feature the software will be accompanied with and, therefore, requiring the need for price skimming if the firm is to gain more revenue from the target market. The main pricing strategy will, however, be penetration marketing and once the customers have become loyal, then, price skimming will be introduced to enhance the revenue and profits of the company. Describe the promotion plan you will implement Promotion plays an important role in the creation of awareness of products and services and also in the quest of an organization to expand its customer base. A successful promotional campaign requires a promotion plan that must consider certain steps. For this case, the first step would be the determination of the marketing communication opportunities. Assessment of these opportunities is mainly dependent on the target market. The results obtained from this assessment is crucial in ensuring the firm understands the best communication channels it should use. For this case, for example, the use of television media could prove to be expensive bearing the people targeted, who are mainly the Chief Executive Officers or other big influencers within organizations. Print media such as business magazines, business newspapers and direct mails could be better strategies to consider for this case. The next step should involve the determination of the objectives for the promotional campaign. The main objective for this case is awareness creation which is expected to lead to customer attraction to the product. The next step involves the determination of promotion mix the campaign will utilize, which will be followed by the development of the promotion message. A promotion budget should be determined, and finally, it would be important to assess the effectiveness of the campaign in achieving its main objective (Westwood, 2013). Identify the target locations with an assessment of their viability Most consumer goods companies are located in the cities and, therefore, New York City will be used as one of the target locations for the product in question. The HR cloud technology will be significant for small, medium and large-sized companies. The technology will, however, have more impact in medium to large sized companies which handle lots of data. Small companies could not have much data, and this could lead to the failure for small organizations to perceive the benefits of having the HR cloud technology. It is, however, important to help the small organizations to understand that they are in a growth process and would with time require the cloud technology for data storage, manipulation, and retrieval. References Buyya, R., & Venugopal, S. (2008). Market-oriented cloud computing: Vision, hype, and reality for delivering it services as computing utilities. In High Performance Computing and Communications, 2008. HPCC'08. 10th IEEE International Conference on (pp. 5-13). Graham, H. (2008). Marketing strategy and competitive positioning . Pearson Education India. Hinterhuber, A. (2008). Customer value-based pricing strategies: why companies resist. Journal of business strategy , 29 (4), 41-50. Westwood, J. (2013). How to write a marketing plan . Kogan Page Publishers.
