Growing Tide Market share

Designing a Sampling strategy

Nandakumar was the product manager at P&G when Tide market
share had plateaued at about 11%.
Tide was number 4 in the pecking order after Surf, Wheel and Henko
in the mid and premium washing powder category
The dilemma was to find the right balance between advertising and
sales promotion.
Nanda and his team had come up with a jasmine fragrance
incorporation in the product and wanted to take a fresh look at total
spends
Product trial in blind tests indicated that Jasmine was a winning idea
and P&G had protected the product idea and the imminent launch
from the prying eyes of competition
Nanda felt that they had to make the surprise count and win high
trial rates in the market. Nanda felt that while a mix of advertising
and promotion will be rolled out, they had to somehow collapse the
cycle of Awareness, reflection, preference and trial and get high trials
achieved. Trial is the clincher with a winning idea
Nanda’s team has come up with the following ideas. Please evaluate
and recommend which one you would adopt
Idea-1: Create trial packs of 100g----to enable 6 bucket wash trials by
an average household. Sell the trial packs thru a home to home
campaign at Rs.10 per sachet. (500g pack price is Rs.150 and hence
the sample pack price is a winner).
Plan for 20 lakh trial pack sales. Expected productivity is 40% .The
agency will charge Rs.1 per call. In each region one agency is
available and each agency can make the 5 lakh calls over 90 days.
The VC per 100 g of product is Rs.10 including taxes – even when
product is issued free the company had to declare/list the cost price
and pay taxes.
Idea-2: Create a 100 g trial pack and give it free from large format
retail shops. Plan for 20 lakh trial pack sales. From each store we can
target 500 trial pack distribution per day. The store will charge a daily
rental of Rs.1000 for the activity and we need to spend Rs.300 per
promoter. For 20 lakh trial packs 4000 demo days were required.
They have planned to enlist 50 stores.
Idea-3: Create a 100 g trial pack and ask all retailers to give it free
with any washing powder the customer bought. Give retailer Rs.5 as
service charge per pack. The distribution can be completed in about
10 days.
Idea-4: Attach the 100g trial pack with a newspaper and distribute.
Give the publication and agent Rs.7 as service charge. In addition the
newspapers demand an advertising to be released on the day the
free pack is distributed and this would cost Rs.80 lakhs in the
aggregate
Please evaluate the pros and cons of each idea?
Please come up with a fifth idea that’s better the first 4.
Please come up with an execution design to improve on first 4 ideas
in terms of impact/outcome
 Evaluation parameters
1) Cost
2) Time
3) Impact on channel
4) Impact on customer
5) Time required to make an impact
6) Possible wastage—how to control
7) How can the scheme design be improved
8)