Drink †Marketing Essay

The brand that we know of today, Snapple, originally was manufactured in 1972 as an all-natural apple juice business in Greenwich Village. Arnie Greenberg, Leonard Marsh, and Hyman Golden founded the Snapple Brand outsourcing production and product development building their network of distributers across New York City. Despite many product flavors that were failures, premium pricing balanced everything out and Snapple was still able to generate revenues. Unlike Snapple, from 1972 to 1993, much start up juice companies had failed or were sold off to larger distributers. Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and Wendy Kaufman were a huge part of the success. The original owners sold the company to Thomas H. Lee Company in 1992, who then sold it to Quaker Oats in 1993. Quaker owned Gatorade and thought that by purchasing Snapple it would be as successful as the sports drink once they started stocking grocery store shelves. Unfortunately, Business Week tells us that this acquisition proved to be one of the major U. S. business disasters of the 1990’s. The brand lost 1. 4 billion dollars in value under Quaker’s ownership as well as the distribution channel power it had established years prior. Four years later, Ken Gilbert and Mike Weinstein of Triarc, used research from a NJ group, Deutsch, Inc. , to assess the company in hopes of setting priorities and to reverse the downward slide Quaker had left the company in. Ultimately, Weinstein had hopes of reinvigorating the brand, though Gilbert was hesitant. Deutsch had researched the brand and found solutions such as demarcating Snapple as a category set aside from any others like diet soda and chocolate milk. Weinstein felt that Snapple was an upbeat drink and that they should keep the ball rolling on an upward track to success. Primary goals for Triarc in the short term go along with some of the business decisions the company made earlier when it was known for its â€Å"all natural† beverages. Increasing sales volume and market share for the Snapple brand in general is the overall culture of the company short term. One example of how to do so would be signing celebrity spokesperson to reconnect with consumers as they once did with Wendy Kaufman. Wendy’s aberrant personality was a form of advertisement for the Snapple brand which also attracted the unpaid media attention. Hopefully with a new personality Snapple will appea4r again on Oprah, and David Letterman. An idea for a celebrity spokesperson would be Angelina Jolie. She travels the world, can show places she has been on commercials with people drinking Snapple. Questions she could ask would be based on their culture by what type of Snapple they enjoy. Market studies should be conducted while promoting the drink so that they can find the top ten favorite flavors nationwide and globally. Sticking by one spokesperson and earning the trust again of the public is key. Earning trust of the public will also include answering fan mail and establishing fan clubs. Over the long term this can be established. She can answer her mail on TV eventually as Wendy once did to connect back to the public. Triarc cannot decide to dump the celebrity midway during success and expect the consumers to respond favorably; we saw the result of this when Wendy was let go in prior years. This lost the brand’s authenticity and trust in the consumer’s eyes. Over the long term I feel that Snapple needs to also increase TV, radio, and print advertising which is innovative to the brand. Once the brand is more recognizable with a celebrity, the additional advertising will get the brand out there. The most important opportunity Snapple has at this time is where it is in the market. It needs to increase itself in the juice/soda drinking market segments. To do so the need to launch new products based on this beverage market what is most popular but keep the same labeling. Aggressive distribution and customer loyalty strategy’s is important. Snapple used to have events such as fashion shows where people would dress up in dresses made only of Snapple lids. Another idea would be to have games like McDonalds has each year with the monopoly pieces. It will get the public of all ages involved and it will be fun. Snapple was considered by many to be a good example of a conventional product that was marketed in an unconventional fashion. Snapple was a popular beverage brand in the USA and several other parts of the world. The brand was launched by the Unadulterated Food Company in New York, in 1972. Over the years, Snapple came to be known for its unconventional promotional efforts which earned the brand a substantial fan following. The Snapple Beverage Corporation became one of the first companies to enter the ‘New Age Beverages’market, which included non-carbonated drinks like tea and juices in the late 1980s. Snapple changed hands several times over the years. However, barring a few bad years, the brand remained very popular among consumers.