Discussion and analysis

Research question 1：Who do AVON sell to？ 

As everyone knows, AVON is a company of cosmetics and AVON defines themselves as the company for woman. To set up the target customers or market can help the company to be more effective and the company can also determine the direction adapt to their goal. (Thomsom, 2004) In the beginning, AVON focused on women and now focuses on all ages including men, women and children. With the on-line shop and the catalogue of AVON, we can see there are many kinds of products that can be used by all family.

The interviewee said that their catalogue only provided for the member in the beginning, people who wanted to buy products of AVON need to be the member of AVON. However, AVON changed the strategy of target customers to achieve maximum profit. In 1995, AVON set up the retail system and it was the first time that AVON changed its strategy. The strategy helped AVON to become a well-known company and customers could buy their products in the physical store and retail mall not only by catalogue.

Research question 2：What basis does AVON apply to new product？ 

According to the “Four P’s” (Riley, 2012), the marketing mix is often defined as the most important elements, and one of the elements is product that refer to the product or services that the customer obtains. The new product development (NPD) focuses on methods of system to satisfy the customer and also enhances the quality of service.

AVON now provides variety products according to the demand of the countries. The interviewee said “AVON innovate its products due to the advanced technology and the demand of the customer. And take Taiwan for example, AVON focuses on the products of sunburn protection and anti-aging, these two are the hottest products in Asia.

Research question 3：What sorts of promotion do AVON have currently in place？ 

From the official website of AVON, we can see AVON still try to enforce and variety its promotion. According to the interview, the interviewee provided the statistic to display the percentage of kinds of promotion. The following pie chart was the promotion that AVON executive in recent year, and we could see catalogue still took majority.

Chart 1: Promotion percentage of AVON

Chart 1.doc  

Limitation:

  The author chooses to survey the two strategy of AVON Taiwan because of time and resource limitation. Most of survey of AVON focused on direct marketing, and few information could be accessed from internet for its strategy of product development and sales promotion. However, the interviewee helped a lot to provide some internal information to do the research.

Implication:

  The two strategies which hypothesized by the author were adapted to the result. The theoretical frameworks supported these two strategies help AVON to be more competitive in the market.

Recommendation:

  Because of time and resource limitation, the author only chooses the development of AVON Taiwan to research. If the researchers have more time, you could try to get more information to complete the research.