My Communication Plan for Lindt

Summary of the Company/Organization/Brand

Lindt & Sprungli AG Company is a chocolate manufacturer, started in the 19^th century in an old town of Zurich, Switherland by two confectioners, David Sprungli-Schwarz and his son Rudolf Sprungli-Ammann. Established in 1845, Lindt has been a premium chocolate producer and has mastered gourmet chocolate confection. Lindt & Sprungli AG Company has brand names including Caffarel, Lindor, and Lindt and offers a diverse range of chocolate collections. The company sells its premium smooth chocolates worldwide through its own Lindt stores, independent distributors, and online. It operates its business in different countries mainly in Switzerland, Germany, France, and North America.

Situation Analysis

·      Audience

After carefully reviewing Lindt’s past performance and the insight I got from its customers, I developed my target audience profile for this communication plan. Lindt offers high-quality products especially with creamy centers of Lindor, but those lovely and cute designs associate with more women than men. Most men admit that Lindt offers high-quality chocolate, but they just don’t have much emotional linkage like women do. As a result, MRI Data shows that women are twice more likely to purchase a Lindt product than men. Thus, I want to help Lindt expand its market and I set the key demographics of the target audience as American men from 18 to 34. The household income typically ranges from $75,000 to $149,999 every year. For the martial status, some of them just married. Those audience values higher education and professional occupations so that they could enjoy a higher standard of life. In addition to the key demographics, the target audience likes to keep updated with outdoors and entertainment magazines. They are actively looking for new things that could get them excited. They are not afraid of challenges because they think challenges can bring them energy. Because Lindt is very active in social media and very accessible to consumers, the target audience could interact with the brand as well as among themselves. They also rely on traditional media channel especially television because they love watching games especially sports competitions with friends. Their decision process not only lies in what the word of mouth says about the brand, but also relies on how the brand engages with them through traditional marketing channels and social media websites.

·      Competitors

We need to take an overview about competitive analysis to analyze the nature of the industry as a whole, and to see how Lindt can better fit into the competitive environment. For Lindt, there are many competitors in the chocolate category. Three main competitors in terms of market shares are Godiva, Hershey’s, and Nestle. Godiva Chocolatier provides exquisite-designed chocolate gifts for people who love to share gifts with friends and families. Nestle S.A promises to give a break and keep your spirit high. Hershey’s offers its consumers pure chocolate so that it guarantees the pure chocolate joy from Hershey’s. Lindt positions itself on lovely and smooth chocolate that is irresistible. Especially with Lindor, Lindt offers high qualities chocolate balls with hard outside but creamy centers.

·      Political Factors, Economic Factors, Social Factors, Technological Factors

Political Factors:

For chocolate consumers who are eco-friendly to the environment, they value the ingredients and the origin of those ingredients.

Economic Factors:

Because consumers consider chocolate as enjoyment, the higher disposable income in the coming future will allow consumers to choose more luxurious chocolate products with higher quality.

Social (Cultural) Factors:

Chocolate is a product that is not only feeds people, but also associates people with enjoyment it brings.

Technological Factors:

New technical machines decorate luxury chocolates with creating lines on the surface of the chocolate, which demands chocolate makers of both flavor and visual pleasure.

·      SWOT Analysis

Strength:

The key strength is its high variety with high quality. Lindt offers chocolate products from Lindor truffle balls to golden bunnies with multiple degrees of coca and different kinds of flavors. Consumers can mix and match their own flavors. Its most popular product—Lindor truffle—provides super smoothness with hard outside and creamy inside. This key strength—offers both high variety and high quality—helps Lindt stand out from its main competitors, such as Godiva (who provides high-quality luxury chocolates) and Hershey’s (who values high accessibility and convenience).

Lindt always has a group of loyal fans that support Lindt chocolate products and often talk about it with their friends and families.

Weakness:

Most of Lindt products have packaging that is so cute and garish that has the potential to distract people from seeing the original essence of Lindt.

Opportunities:

There is a growing number of consumers who believe sugar consumption is closely linked to obesity and heart attack. As a result, they tend to prefer dark chocolate. In this way, Lindt, as a trend shaper in the dark chocolate field, can take advantage of its strength on the various degrees of coca of its chocolate products to better meet the need.

Most male consumers do regard Lint as high-quality premium chocolate product, but they just don’t get much passion as women do. In this way, Lindt could expand its market by focusing more on male market and associate more enjoyment with them.

Winter has the opportunity for skiing, a timely outdoor activity for men to enjoy.

Threats:

The major threat is that the input price of sugar is expected to increase in 2012, which create potential threat to the industry as a whole.

Objectives

My marketing plan aims to increase sales by 20% by March 2013 compared to the previous winter. I attempt to expand the market share for Lindt by 5% since now its consistent marketing strategies both domestically and internationally rely heavily on its existing target audience (42.6% women aged 18-49) and their repetitively positive messages.

Strategy

After doing primary and secondary research on insight from the target audience and comparing Lindt with its main competitors, I came up with my creative strategy that meets the marketing objective.

·      My strategy goes beyond the packaging, and uses Lindt’s distinct quality to associate passion and energy with men in order to stimulate interest.

·      My strategy is to launch the  “Ski with Lindt This Winter” campaign based on entertainment and outdoor magazines and TV commercials, as well as on social media websites.

·      By launching the “Ski with Lindt This Winter” campaign, I want to stress that the essence of the Lindt chocolate not only lies in its silky smoothness, but also conveys the zeal that brings. In this way, male customers associate passion and energy with Lindt. Since they value pleasure over flavor, they can be motivated by this campaign.

Tactics

Despite the rise in social media, I still believe that traditional media has its own advantage on sharing values and beliefs. Especially for this campaign, since it is a diversion of Lindt’s previous marketing strategies, I plan to enter into the market first via traditional media in order to announce it for the large audience.

·      TV Commercial: A well-fit man is skiing from the top of a Swiss snow mountain. The smoothness of Lindt is just like that of the snow, and the energy you get from Lindt is just like the energy you get from the skiing activity. Even though you are on a snow mountain in winter, you still get excited and energized by Lindt. Through the TV commercial, I attempt to announce the new marketing strategy we are focusing on, and to stimulate people’s intent to buy and their intent to visit our redesigned website.

·      Press Release: I want to use press release to pitch companies and media in order to grab their attention of my campaign. In this way, I want to help them realize the importance of the campaign and to get their support on expanding our market.

·      Magazine Ad: The ad will be place in outdoor activity and entertainment magazines such as Entertainment Specials. It will emphasize the outdoor activity element that helps to bring passion to people. A call to action will be utilized to invite customers to visit our redesigned website and to download our skiing app game.

After those traditional media channels, I attempt to engage more with my target audience in digital media:

·      Homepage Redesign: Lindt’s current homepage design is so feminine that is not energetic enough to grab much male attention. I want to add one more picture about my campaign and to highlight the call to action to increase intent to buy.

·      iPhone/iPad App Game: An app game of skiing would be an attractive tactic for the target audience because they tend to be active in digital media and love doing outdoor activities. Like app games such as “Subway Surf,” the Lindt skiing game would set a bunch of barriers during the skiing experience, and players gain extra energy from different kinds of Lindt chocolates. In addition, players can share and post their scores on their Facebook page to compete with their friends. And those who have higher scores have the chance to be the winner to gain the special collection of “Skiing with Lindt” every week during this winter. In this way, the target audience will relate Lindt with pleasure and passion in a subconscious way and share their experience with their friends.

Evaluation Methods

As the last stage of the communication plan, the evaluation should reflect how I can measure the success of the campaign and how the results meet my objectives. Since the tactics I use are both traditional and digital, I should use both primary and secondary methods to evaluate my campaign.

·      First, once the traditional media such as TV commercials and magazines ads launches the “Ski with Lindt This Winter” campaign, I will keep collecting data for new visitors to our homepage and new likes on our Facebook page. If those numbers are increasing but the rate of additional call to actions such as buying our products are still pretty low, I would consider my campaign not successful.

·      Second, I will measure the results using both qualitative and quantitative methods. I will monitor the number of sales for this season specifically, to see how much the sales increase. Since the target audience of this campaign is men, I would like to do some qualitative evaluations with them. I plan to run a focused group consisting of men, and I will do a content audit about what they say about the brand especially how they feel about the campaign. I expect my focus group to have a stronger sentiment about Lindt brand after the campaign.

·      Third, I would like to evaluate how the digital media helps to engage more with my target audience. I will monitor the data for new sign-ups, unique visitors, page views, the time on the site, and the bounce rate for our homepage using Google Analytics. I want to see how likely viewers take actions after seeing the new campaign and to what degree the new design helps to raise interest for them to look at other subpages. In addition, I will collect data for downloading the Lindt skiing game app, the frequency of playing the game on iPhones and iPads and posting the scores on Facebook. Ideally, I would like to see customers taking actions and rising interests in the brand.

Works Sited:

http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company profile.Chocoladefabriken_Lindt__Spr%C3gli_AG.464deeeb5191efa8.html

http://lindt.corporate-reports.net

Annual Report 2011: http://lindt.corporate-reports.net/cgi-bin/show.ssp?companyName=lindt&report_id=gb-2011&language=English

IBISWorld: http://clients1.ibisworld.com/reports/us/industry/ataglance.aspx?entid=230

https://www.facebook.com/LindtChocolate/app_292969747471479