6.

MARKETING PLAN

INTRODUCTION

Marketing can be defined as satisfying needs and wants through an exchange process.
In addition, marketing also can be defined as a business function and set of processes
involved in creating, delivering and communicating value to customers, followed by
managing customer relationships, resulting in mutual benefit for the business and its
stakeholders. To start a business, marketing is known as one of the most important part.
Without a suitable and proper plan of marketing, the business may never achieve its goals
and objectives.

Marketing is a key part of a successful business and we must use marketing plan as a
basis for executing marketing strategy. A marketing plan sets out to clear objectives and
lists of actions that can help us to achieve our target. The task of marketing department of
Zahra Sdn Bhd is to fulfil our customers’ need and satisfaction. In the meantime, we also
want to achieve our targeted profits. A lack of understanding of the marketing concept
can result in poorly developed product that fails to meet the customers’ need and want.
This can affect our marketing efforts and sales performance, overall business expansion
and progress.

Basically, the basic ideas of marketing is an exchange activity that takes place
between a business entity and its customer. These customers include individual business
entity, and also the support organizations. Marketing is a crucial aspect in a business and
always referred as the backbone to any business in achieving a profitable outcome.

In our business, we are introducing our new service which has never been produced
before and that is Click Your Zahra. It is a mobile application where customers can
design their own flower bouquet based on their preferences. Zahra Sdn Bhd creates a new
platform for the customers by creating a network that enables customers to create their
own bouquet and flower arrangement. Our apps has an excellent feature which allows
customers to select their own flowers, arranged how they want and will be hand-delivered
right to their door. By creating this application, it gives chances to customers to express
their own creativity by making on their own.
MARKET ANALYSIS

Market analysis is one of the main factors in marketing. It is a study that designed to
define a company’s market, forecast their directions and how to expand the company’s
share and exploit any new trends. Market analysis includes target market, market size,
competition, market share, sale forecast and marketing strategy.

I. CUSTOMER

To ensure that marketing effort full customer needs and wants as well as earning
profits, we have taken steps to identify and focus our effort on a selected group of
customers. This is to ensure that the marketing efforts taken are within our scopes and
capabilities of our business. Target market is defined as the group of customers with
needs and want to be satisfied by the business through the supply of goods and
services. Identifying the target market is an essential step for any company in the
development of a marketing plan. Not knowing who the target market is, could cost a
lot of money and time for a company.

Zahra Snd Bhd’s target customer are the people around Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.
We are targeting people around the age of 20 to 35 years old. This target customers
are divided into two groups which are the local community and students. We have
segmented our market based on these three factors, which are geographic,
demographic and physcographic. Market segmentation is the technique that we apply
in order to identify our order which greatly helps in deciding our target market. It
involves the process of defining and subdividing a large homogeneous market into
clearly identifiable segments having similar needs, wants or demand characteristics.
Its objective is to design a marketing mix that precisely matches the expectation of
customer in the targeted segment. This is because, mistakes in market segmenting
may cause business to lose sales.

GEOGRAPHIC

We have chosen Kuala Lumpur as our business location for our physical store and
focusing mainly around Kuala Lumpur and Selangor for our online store based on a
few aspects that has been considers which are the infrastructures, the system of
transportation, distance and the environment. Furthermore, the location of our
 physical store is strategic as it is located in Taman Sri Rampai, Kuala Lumpur. Our
store is also easy to find because it is located near to Wangsa Walk Mall and Medan
Selera D’tasik Sri Rampai. Therefore, it is easy for customers to walk in our store or
shop online on our application.

PSYCHOGRAPHIC

Psychographic segmentation divides the market into groups according to customer’s

lifestyle. Activities, interest and opinion (AIO) are the tools of measuring lifestyle. It
considers a number of potential influences in buying behaviour, including the
attitudes, expectations and activities of customers. From our research, we identified
our target market is people that come from all levels of income of working man and
woman.

Flowers have been widely used for different occasions such as graduation, birthday,
wedding or decorations of homes. Therefore, our product and service are focusing to
those who demand flower bouquet or gifts for any occasion. Based on our research,
we are competing with other companies (online store) and shops such as Vibrant
Blooms Flowers and Gift, De Flower Bar Florist and Gaura.my. So, we decided to
make our service different from others, where we create a mobile applications where
customers can custom-made their own flower bouquet including delivery services.
This type of differential can attract customers to buy from our company, besides the
fact that our products and services are unique.

II. MARKET SIZE AND TRENDS

POPULATION

Population of Wangsa Maju = 300,000

Estimation target per month: 0.05% × 300,000 = 150

No. Name of product Estimate Sales Per Total Estimated

Product Sales/Monthly (RM)
1. Flower bouquet RM35×150 RM5,250
 TOTAL MARKETING SIZE

Total marketing size = RM35 × 150

= RM5,250

Total sales per year = RM5,250 × 12

= RM63,000

III. COMPETITION AND COMPETITIVE EDGES

Competitors Strengths Weaknesses

Vibrant Blooms  Fast response and  Not variety
Flower and Gift friendly service  Unattractive packaging
 Fast delivery  Expensive
De Flower Bar  Reasonable price  Delayed and late delivery
Florist  Neat packaging
Gaura Gift and  Lots of choices and
Florist designs
 Well-known brand
 Affordable price

Comparing Competitors Product

Competitors Product Properties

Vibrant Blooms Flower  They have their own website page to connect with
and Gift the customers. To make an order, the customer have
to contact them with the number provided and
email them if there is any enquiries.
 The average price is RM170
 Delivery will be charged based on the customer’s
location and will be delivered on the same day
De Flower Bar Florist  They own a website and social media in order for
them to connect with the customers. The customers
can make their order through website which
actually ease the process of ordering.
 The average price is RM78
 Delivery will be charged based on the customer’s
location and will be delivered on the same day
Gaura Gift and Florist  They also own a website and social media for
customers to make an order.
 The average price is RM50
 Delivery will be charged based on the customer’s
location and will be delivered on the same day

Fundamental Values and Customer Needs

As you observe the products that other competitors offer, you can see that the
service of flower bouquet and gifts have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Both De Flower Bar Florist and Gaura Gift and Florist share the same advantages,
which they own a website and social media in order for them to connect with their
customers. Meanwhile for Vibrant Blooms Flower and Gift, they only own a website.
They do not have any social media hence it is difficult for the customer to contact
them. However, out of all these three competitors, none of them had the economic
benefit that we, Zahra Florist, offer to our customer is that our mobile application. All
of the competitors own a website and communicate through WhatsApp, however
these websites are not performing better compared to mobile application. A well-
designed mobile application can perform actions much quicker than a mobile website.
They usually store their data locally on mobile devices, in contrast to websites that
generally use web servers. For this reason, data retrieval happens swiftly in mobile
apps.
IV. ESTIMATED MARKET SHARE AND SALES

Product/service Market Share and Sales

Year
Zahra Sdn Bhd 2019 2020 2021

Market share (%) - 2% 3%

Total sales in units 11,232 11,232 14,040

Total sales in RM RM393,120 RM393,120 RM491,400

V. MARKETING STRATEGIES

Marketing strategy is a process that allows our company to concentrate on

business plan in order to achieve the marketing objective. It gives the information
about the target market and what are the customer needs and wants. There are four
elements which are known as 4P’s of the marketing and they are product, pricing,
place and promotion. These elements are provided to fulfil what customers needed.

 Product

Our main service is the mobile application which allows customers to customize
their own flower bouquet and gifts based on their preferences. In Malaysia, a few
of flower shops have their own mobile application but none of them have the
mobile apps that offers customers to design their own flower bouque. Therefore,
Zahra Sdn Bhd gain an advantage as the first one in Malaysia market to do this
concept.

 Pricing

Our company provides flower bouquet and gifts within reasonable price and high
quality products and services. Zahra Sdn Bhd is using competition-based pricing
as our pricing strategy. This pricing strategy is defined as a pricing method that
makes use of competitors’s prices for the same or similar product as basis in
 setting a price. It used competitors’ prices as a benchmark. With this pricing
strategy, we set the price of our products slightly below the competitors.

Vibrant Blooms Flower and Gift Average price = RM170

De Flower Bar Florist Average price = RM78
Gaura Gift and Florist Average price = RM50
Zahra Sdn Bhd Average price = RM35

 Place

Our company located in Kuala Lumpur and the location is very strategic as it is
located near to Wangsa Walk Mall and Medan Selera D’tasik Sri Rampai. Plus,
our location is situated near the supplier which will make us easier to get the
materials and stocks. Here, we can easily get the labour supply. Moreover, the
premise rentals are reasonable and affordable in this area.

 Promotion

Promotion strategy is a method used by our company in order to attract the target
market. We used promotion as a supplement to the products, price and place
strategies to achieve marketing objectives. We will have a sales promotion on
every season, mainly focus on graduation season and valentine days.

 Advertising

The advertising concept that our company provided is through social medias,
mobile application, business card and online advertisement will be used for the
purposes of increasing and maintaining the sales of our product. People can gain
more information through this medium.

 Social Media

We have created our social media page such as Facebook and Instagram, to
promote and sell our product to customers. Inside these social media page, we
include the related information about our products. It also consist of location of
our premise and news about our company.

 Business Card
 Each of the managers will have their own business cards. Our business cards will
be distributed to the customers. Through this way, people will know about the
existence of our company and our business products. Thus, the visitors can
distribute information about our products to other people.

 Online advertisement

For our product, we will use online advertisement as our primary weapon in
marketing. We believe that Internet is the most efficient marketing as our target
market is people around Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. Plus, by Internet, we can
reach the majority working adults and students as most of them have social media
account. Therefore, we will put our marketing budget on Facebook and Instagram
ads.