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Branding and Marketing Strategy

Although there are up to 18 marketing strategies today, we consider it prudent to base

ourselves on those generic strategies that have guided several companies worldwide to

success. In this case, we choose one of the three generic strategies developed by Michael

Porter in his book on Competitive Advantage (1985). We will use the differentiation strategy

since we consider it appropriate for the business based on the insights and research we did

and because we recognize that Michael Porter has made fundamental contributions with his

academic research, which makes him a great business strategist, academic and of course an

opinion leader in everything related to business competitiveness.

Differentiation Strategy - Marketing

Until now, the business has operated without a strategic or marketing plan, so we

cannot analyze the strategy they are currently using; however, based on the meetings held

with the owner and our research, we have identified that the optimal strategy would be to

apply this strategy since it would allow the business to achieve a competitive advantage.

In the differentiation strategy, the company must focus on making its product, service

and other elements related to the business unique, meaning that other businesses do not

currently offer it or are difficult to imitate. Furthermore, it should be noted that this difference

must occur in any relevant aspect to the customer since this will increase their satisfaction,

their loyalty to the brand and, finally, their willingness to pay more for the item Porter (1985).

The CEO stated that she currently offers uninterrupted service 24/7, this could be

considered as a differentiator if the service is offered constantly, which creates a feeling of

credibility in clients, knowing that if they need a floral arrangement anytime, she would

always be available to meet their request.

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In every marketing strategy, we must be clear that we cannot offer something that we

cannot or won't fulfill; the company must project how this decision could affect its costs,

performance, and operations since it must be sustained over time and must additionally be

promoted so that customers know it and recommend it in the market increasing the brand

awareness too.

Additionally, we want to highlight that applying differentiation as a strategy cannot be

a static decision since if, as we expect, we obtain favourable results, it is logical that the

competitors will try to imitate it, which is why it is crucial that we are always aware of

consumer and market trends so that our differentiator is maintained or adjusted Porter (1985).

With all the stated above, in Figure 1, we have set some differentiator ideas to

implement in the business.

Figure 1.

Differentiators proposed for Bita W Florista.

Source. Own elaboration

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Branding

Once the strategy that will guide the company in terms of marketing has been defined,

we can structure the next steps to take regarding the branding of Bita W Florista. In Figure 2,

we have proposed some initiatives to improve the business Branding.

Figure 2.

Branding next steps proposed for Bita W Florista.

Source. Own elaboration

Social Media Presence

We live in an era where instant responses are necessary for customers, as they expect

companies to do much more than offer them products or services; they also expect the brand

to generate an authentic connection with them, which generates customer engagement and

can create greater brand awareness. Social media has evolved and now is a powerful tool for

companies willing to build and improve their brand visibility; social networks have reached

over 4.8 billion users worldwide. (Rakhimova & Sayitova, 2022)

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If we must conceptualize social media, we can say, based on research, that it is a tool

that promotes social interaction and the scalability of communication through certain

platforms whose evolution has increased due to the number of active mobile devices. and

greater access to the internet by the population. These technological tools have certain

characteristics that allow them to generate useful information for the company, for example,

data analytics (Lim, & Rasul, 2022).

The brands companies most commonly use to generate brand awareness and customer

engagement on social networks are Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and

Twitter (Lim, & Rasul, 2022).

This section will analyze Bita W Florist's Social Media presence and provide

suggestions for achieving their goals. In the following figures, we show the search results

when we write “Bita W Florist” and the social media profile's quantity of followers.

Instagram

As we reviewed previously in the definitions, Instagram is a powerful platform

frequently used to generate content and engage users of different brands and businesses.

Bita W Florist is a business from another previous business that had to close due to

the high cost of rent in Vancouver. When searching on Instagram, options like “Bita Florist”

will appear, which is the original business profile; however, as we can see in Figure 3, when

searching for “Bita W Florist” we see that two accounts also appear on Instagram, which can

confuse users or customers, who will click on one of them and see that it is empty or not

regularly fed, this generates distrust in the user and also makes them lose interest in the

brand.
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Figure 3.

Results when searching for Bita W Florista on Instagram.

Source. Instagram searching tool.

On Instagram, the official account can be found as “bita.w.florist” as we can

see on Figure 4 this account has 274 followers and is the social network most fed (111

posts), although not with the necessary frequency to generate an impact regarding the

acquisition of followers or leads that may be of interest to the company.

Figure 4.

Bita W Florist Instagram profile main page.

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Source. Bita W Florist Instagram profile.

Facebook

The next social network analyzed is Facebook. As shown in Figure 5, two accounts

appeared when we used the Facebook search tool to find Bita W Florist, so it would be

confusing for the user to identify which one is the official account. The business must leave

just one active profile to help the customer make less effort to find what they are looking for.

Figure 5.

Results when searching for Bita W Florista on Facebook.

Source. Facebook searching tool.

The official account name is “Bita.w.florist”, it has zero followers and zero likes, and

although the owner has set the profile in 2022, the posts and interactions are close to zero as

we can see in the Figure 6.

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Figure 6.

Bita W Florist Facebook profile “about” section.

Source. Bita W Florist Facebook profile.

Tik Tok

The TikTok account has been set up, and there are no other similar accounts, but as

with the other social networks, there is no activity, and the engagement is poor. Just one

person follows the account, as seen in Figure 7.

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Figure 7.

Results when searching for Bita W Florista on TikTok.

Source. Bita W Florist TikTok profile.

Linkedin

Finally, we have a social network called LinkedIn; this is often used to connect with

people part of a specific industry or company and could be useful for people who are focused

when there is an ongoing business-to-business model.

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LinkedIn is considered a professional tool, so having an active company profile is

important. Bita W Florist has set up the account, and if we use the LinkedIn search tool, no

other companies appear; we can see in more detail this in Figure 8.

Figure 8.

Results when searching for Bita W Florista on Linkedin.

Source. Instagram searching tool.

Something relevant about LinkedIn is that we can create personal profiles and link

them to a company profile, so it is important to keep our personal profile updated and project

professionalism if we decide to link it to the company because every time a user searches for

the name of the company, our profile will also appear.

The relevance of having a LinkedIn personal profile linked to the company is that we

can network with potential customers, suppliers, and investors. Figure 9 is a quick view of the
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LinkedIn professional of Weilin Guo; there are no fresh updates, and the personal branding of

the CEO could be improved (picture, description, main page banner, etc)

Figure 9.

Bita W Florista CEO’s LinkedIn personal profile.

Source. Bita W Florist CEO’s LinkedIn profile.

As a quick review, we could state that the social media presence of Bita W Florist is

weak; there is no set communication or marketing plan where we can find guidelines for

creating content. The frequency of the posts is also a problem because to keep our community

engaged, we must keep posting and updating the profiles.

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Next steps for Social Media

As the Company doesn’t have enough followers or content on its profile, we don’t

think using Social Ads is a good strategy. For the company at this moment, it is better to get

organic traffic, and to achieve that, it is important to complete the profiles with interesting

company descriptions, change the profile's picture with the same one for all (high quality),

and add telephone numbers, email, and links to the other social networks.

After that, it is necessary to create a Social Media content calendar, with specific content

for each social network for at least the next month, following the brand identity guidelines,

with copies and text created with a storytelling style and finally, following Inbound

Marketing techniques and the AIDA model to catch the attention of many users as possible.

It is important to create a personal brand for the CEO, to tell the business story through

her, to transmit her passion for flowers, the detail-oriented she is, that this business is not just

about money for her and the importance of buying locally. A good story, fresh and consistent

content and an omnichannel strategy could help the business to achieve a position in this

industry.

Mockups for Social Media

For content creation, the company must appeal customer emotions, for doing that is

necessary to be aware of trends and customer needs or wills. For example, some posts could

promote seasonal products, and others could highlight the company's environmental approach

and support the Vancouver Green Operations Plan, which intends to reduce carbon emissions

and convert to neutral carbon by 2050 (Rachell Telling, 2020). With this type of content, Bita

W Florist can leverage its brand reputation as environmentally responsible, which could
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influence purchase intention and demand elasticity because of this Green Marketing strategy

(Severo & de França, 2021).

Another good trend is the “buy locally” here, the company can tell through storytelling

that her flowers are locally purchased, the importance of buying from local producers who

can share tips about flower care, and the story of the flowers, among others.

In this section, we propose a couple of Mock-ups for the brand, as shown in Figure 10

and Figure 11.

Figure 10.

Mock-up for Bita W Florista's Instagram post.

Source. Own elaboration.

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Figure 11.

Mock-up for Bita W Florista's Instagram post.

Source. Own elaboration.

E-Commerce Features for the Business

As the business offers its products without any intermediary, we can state that it uses a

B2C or business-to-consumer business model. These days, completing the interaction

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between seller and consumer starts with online research, and for many companies, the entire

sale process can be done online. This is called ecommerce (Faiz & Kumar, 2021).

Shopify

Bita W Florista's website is an e-commerce that was set up on Shopify, but although it

has basic contact or product information, some areas of improvement need to be solved to

facilitate and improve the user experience in the platform and sales (Faiz & Kumar, 2021).

Millions of merchants worldwide are using Shopify; this platform requires no high

skills as it is intuitive, so the entrepreneurs have to add some pictures, text, and contact

information. Their e-commerce could be set in a few hours instead of months, as in the

programmed websites.

As Shopify is a pre-set platform, some people could think that it is limited in features

and that the options are not enough, or there could be many identical e-commerce online, but

the platform allows entrepreneurs to edit, add extra features that could generate a great

impact and high users’ interaction and high sales volume.

Shopify website (2023) shows some interesting indicators. For example, 444 billion

dollars in economic activity have occurred globally through their platform. Many of these

sales indicators came from renowned companies that have trusted the platform, such as Red

Bull, Tesla, Heinz UK, Lindt Ca, and Kylie Cosmetics. (Shopify website, 2023).

We mention the above to understand that Shopify is a powerful tool as long as it is

built and fed effectively. It is also important to consider that it generates data that can be used

in favour of Bita W Florist, who must apply data analytics to make decisions for continuous

improvement.
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Google Ads

As Google is the search engine most used in the world, it also makes Google the main

SEM platform. To clarify, SEM is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing, or a strategy

used to redirect traffic from search engines like Google or Bing to websites through paid ads

(Cantor, 2017).

This tool is highly relevant because it shows ads when users search for something

online. Unlike traditional marketing, SEM shows relevant ads to the right person at the right

moment, which increases the chances of getting a lead or generating a sale (Cantor, 2017).

With the mentioned above, we encourage the business to set up the campaigns

appropriately. She runs Google Ads, but we have noted that the keywords, the extensions and

the negative words were not properly set up.

In this type of campaign, it is fundamental to carefully follow the process, to know

how the tool works and what the meaning of the options the platform has is, and to choose

the best option for the company's goals.

Regarding the keywords, it is necessary to choose those not being high priced in the

bids because our budget will run out fast, and we probably won't see any positive results.

Also, it is important to set up as negative words those things we don’t want to promote, for

example, “work in Bita W Florist” or “Work with us.”

If the company has not used the CAD 600 that Google Ads gives, if you spend CAD

600, it is recommended to accept that offer because, with that budget, the business can run

some ads and do A/B testing to generate data to analyze (Google, 2023).
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Finally, we can recommend that when the company sets up a campaign, leave the time

to process the insights. This tool will not give you immediate results; it takes at least a month

to see any input.

In Figure 12, we have briefly created a guide for the company to follow to set up

successful campaigns on Google Ads (Google, 2023).

Figure 12.

Guide to launch

Google Ads

Campaigns for

Bita W Florist.
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Source. Own elaboration based on Google Ads Website info.

References

Cantor, A. (2017). SEM: Promoción en Google y otros motores de búsqueda. Editorial Ink.

City of Vancouver (2018). Zero waste 2040.

https://council.vancouver.ca/20180516/documents/pspc2a.pdf

Faiz, M., Jain, K., Tailor, N., & Kumar, M. L. (2021, May). Importance of Business to

Consumer model of E-commerce. International.

Google (2023). Google. https://ads.google.com/

Lim, M., & Rasul, T. (2022). Customer engagement and social media. Journal of Business

Research. 1-4.

Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance.

1985. New York: FreePress, 45.

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Rachell Telling (2020). Vancouver Green Operations Plan. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/12-

09-2020-green-operations.pdf

Rakhimova, I. I., Berdikulova, G. N., Axmedova, Z. J., & Sayitova, U. H. (2022). Positive

aspects of the communicative, psychological effect of social networks on the

individual. Journal of Research In Social Sciences.

Severo, E. A., de Lima, E. T., dos Anjos, J. S., de Almeida, S. M., dos Santos, S. R., & de

França, P. P. (2021). The relationship between eco-innovation, sustainable

consciousness, environmental strategy, organizational performance and environmental

impact in northeast Brazil. Revista Ibero-Americana de Estratégia.

Shopify Website. (2023). Shopify. https://www.shopify.com/