Fedex Marketing Packaging

Methodology

FedEx Office’s office supplies, one of the national chains in US, is considering undertaking a restructuration, aiming to gain a significant share of the US office supplies market.  Therefore, this report focuses on the analysis of the survey questionnaire, trying to understand the insights of customers’ spending habits and the drivers behinds their behaviors, identifies opportunities for growth and finally makes some recommendations.

The metrics used in this analysis are AAU (Awareness, Attitude, Usage), market share, penetration share, share of wallet, and usage index.

Studies of awareness, attitudes and usage (AAU) is able to dig levels and trends in customer knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, intentions and purchase behaviors and they are most useful when compared against a benchmark (Bendle, Farris, Pfeifer & Reibstein, 2016). For awareness, several methods can be used, like top of mind brand recall within stated category, total unprompted brand recall, unprompted brand recall and prompted brand recognition, which require ad awareness and brand knowledge. And liking, perceived value for money, perceived quality and purchase intentions measure the attitude, gaining the information of relevance to consumer, perceived value rating, quality perception rating and likelihood of purchase. While for usage, the metrics can be purchase frequency, volume purchased on a shopping occasion and brands held. Therefore, “AAU metrics concern a vast range of information that can be tailored to specific companies and markets and they provide managers with insight into customers’ overall relationships with a given brand or product” (Bendle, Farris, Pfeifer & Reibstein, 2016). But sometimes, awareness can be misleading that it does not have a positive relationship with preference. For example, a consumer’ s high brand awareness does not mean he has high preference as well since maybe he is familiar with this brand but does not actually trust it. Therefore, the business needs to increase the AAU of customers, and meanwhile, the engagement should be encouraged as well.

Besides, market share is an indicator of how well a firm is doing against its competitors, which enables marketers to translate sales targets into market share since this will demonstrate whether forecasts are to be attained by growing with the market or by capturing share from competitors. And market share is closely monitored for signs of change in the competitive landscape and it frequently drives strategic or tactical action (Bendle, Farris, Pfeifer & Reibstein, 2016). It is calculated by the percentage of a market accounted by a specific entity. Increasing in market share allows company to achieve higher probability and grow its revenues.

Then, penetration is a measure of brand or category popularity and it is defined as the number of people who buy a specific brand or a category of goods at least once in a given period, divided by the size of the relevant market population. Also, it helps indicate which of these strategies would be most appropriate and help managers to monitor their success (Bendle, Farris, Pfeifer & Reibstein, 2016).

Share of wallet represents the percentage of purchases within the relevant category, calculated solely among buyers of a specific brand. It is a measure of loyalty, which can guide a firm’s decision on whether to allocate resources toward efforts to expand a category, to take customers from competitors, or to increase share of requirements among its established customers. Its purpose is to understand the source of market share in terms of breadth and depth of consumer franchise, as well as the extent of relative category usage (Bendle, Farris, Pfeifer & Reibstein, 2016). It narrows the universe and focuses on the share of customer sales only.  

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