Hello friends and teachers ,My name is Hussain.

I was the pricing manager for our business Gifts

By Marie-Claire. As a pricing manager my duties included identifying the prices to be optimally
set to have maximum sales and generate maximum profitability for the business. I was also
responsible for calculating details related to finance like our break even calculations, our profit
and loss statement and help my group in competitor analysis. I will be structuring this video on
the guidelines given by Francis.
The market day activity was conducted as a part of the unit Marketing Planning and
Management. I met our business group or partners in March and we got along very well
from day one. Our group decided to enter the gifts segment of the market based on the
psychographic and demographic analysis of the data from market days held in previous
years. The market days were held on 2 days, the first one on 10
th
of may and the second
market day was held on the 17
th
of may 2014.
As the pricing manager of the business I decided we adopt the price skimming strategy to sell
our products that is to sell products at a higher price initially and then lower the price
once enough market had been captured or goods sold or other situations like a new
competitor emerged. This was also done assuming and rightly so that consumers have
limited amount of disposable income and they would try and buy more things on
market day 1. Our pricing was just right, we sold almost 70% of our stock on market day
1 and we reached our break even point much sooner than expected on day 1. We in
fact made profits on day 1 itself. This taught me a valuable lesson, we could have priced
our products higher on day 1 itself. We could have introduced our products at the price
we did as an introductory price and increased the prices in the second half of market
day. If the sales response would have been not to our expectations, we could have
reduced the prices back to the introductory price.
On market day 2, we had to change our product mix where we had to sell individual deodorants
instead of selling them in a pack as we did not have enough product for day 2. Our
pricing was right again as we sold out completely by the end of day 2. We had planned
to sell 70 units initially, but after repackaging we ended up selling 114 units. Our
business generated a turnover of $4550. This figure translated to $2260 profit and
profitability of 49.6%. Considering that we used about $2000 of our budget, the return
on investment was over 90%. Although, it was not a specific role allotted to me, I took
the initiative to mingle with the customers in the market and invited them to our stall to
try our products.
What I personally learned from this exercise was the value of team work in any organization as
my friends helped me understand a lot of things. I would also stress on the importance
of understanding your customer needs and values. If you have a product that appeals to
the customer, they will buy it. I could connect how the most basic marketing theories
including Maslows hierarchy and the AIDA principle applied to us. By focusing our
energies on a specific group we were able to attract their attention, develop an interest
in our product and create a desire for our product (by appealing to vanity, value and
need) and invited them to act on those by buying our product. I also could see how the
4 Ps of marketing applied to our business and why Pricing is such an important part of
the mix.
If Gifts by marie Claire were to go into business again, I would recommend focusing on our
pricing as our supply was inelastic or fixed, the only option to make more money would
be to price the products higher.
Thank you for watching this video