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OK, Martin, I asked you to prepare the case study of Ralcona, the soft-drinks manufacturer. Let's work through the main issues together. Now, I assume you've looked at the background? Can you give me a summary? Yeah, well, Ralcona are a UK company who had one very famous drink -- Jista -- which was selling well world-wide. But two years ago, when the new Chairman arrived, he decided to exploit that popularity to expand the product range. Ralcona had introduced jista into markets in Japan, Australia and several South-East Asian countries. But there's recently been a slide in sales, despite the fact that jista is still holding up reasonably well against some stiff competition from other multinationals. OK, stop there, because I want to fill you in on the discussions that took place in the planning of this new product range -- they were very interesting. Inevitably, the various interested parties in the company all had very different ideas, but they all advocated caution. So, for example, the finance department wanted to test the markets closer to home first, while the marketing team were worried any new drinks would dilute the image of the core brand and so were looking at new names, But across the board, the people at the top favoured launching each product separately at different times to get maximum impact for each product. So that's what happened. All right, go on. |
