Come-back of Dr Pepper on the Russian market

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT ST.PETERSBURG STATE UNIVERSITY

«Come-back of Dr Pepper on the Russian market»

Final Project

Group#10

Saint-Petersburg 2011

Contents

Introduction. 3

Customer analysis. 4

Competitor analysis. 5

PESTEL-analysis. 7

SWOT-analysis. 9

4P Marketing Mix. 11

Action plan. 12

Conclusion. 13

Introduction

The main idea of this project is to create a successful penetration strategy on the market for the product, which has already made an attempt to do it, but failed. It is 13 years since the company leaved the market and everything has changed. We decided to analyze current situation on the market and new opportunities of the company in order to understand whether the penetration and taking a market share became possible or not, what factors still have the greatest influence on making such decision and what circumstances changed and do not present difficulties for the company any more.

Going across the borders a company have to survive in a hash competition as the globalization gains momentum, the power of global giants is increasing  and the entry borders become higher and higher. There are 2 types of marketing strategies a company can choose:  a strategy of cost leadership or brand differentiation, in other words creating additional functional and emotional benefits for consumers. The second one is more popular for Russian, European, American companies etc., so the object of our research is not exclusion.

Dr Pepper Snapple Group – American soft drink company, based in Plano, Texas. Its most famous brand is  Dr Pepper –  soft drink,  was created in the 1880s in Texas, marketed as having a unique flavor, famous for its cherry taste. In simple words it is cherry cola. It was differentiated as Diet Dr Pepper and Cherry Dr Pepper. Now it is on sale in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America – quite a big extent of the world market. The essential question here is: “Why it is not present on Russian market, where the main competitors of this drink – the Coca Cola Company and Pepsi Cola – caught the opportunity and captured their market share since 1979 and 1972 respectively?”

Some of us (Russians) remember the end of the 90^th when we saw this product on the shelves of shops and remember its taste. But the strategy of penetration on the Russian market failed mostly because of the one of the hardest crisis in the history of Russia – Default in the 1998, the company could not stand the competition and abrupt demand decrease. But lots of citizens still remember the taste of their childhood and youth and being in Europe can’t help buying several bottles of Dr Pepper and bring it to Russia. Actually it is not the only way to get Dr Pepper, some grocer’s shops specializes on European products have the drink in their range, but its price here is much higher than it could be.

An interesting fact that some fans of Dr Pepper in Russia created a petition for returning the drink back and placed it in the Internet a half a year ago for signing and it is already have about 5000 voices, taking into consideration that it doesn’t have any promotion in Ru-net.

Customer analysis

Population

 The population of Russian Federation is approximately 142, 905,2  people (to compare the population of Europe is 830,4 million people).  It has a tendency to decrease:  in the period between 2011 and 2015 it is going decrease by 309 thousand people. But it is going to be partly compensated be migration of guest workers from countries of the Newly Independent States. The number of employed guest workers per year is about 300 thousand people and about 2,7 million people unemployed.