The Crest product line includes toothpaste, toothbrushes, dental floss, whitening products, and mouthwash. Each of these products has several variations, creating a program of oral care for everyone.
In developing a marketing plan, there are several questions that Proctor and Gamble must ask themselves in order to get their product to the correct consumers. These include identifying your target audience, identifying the competition, deciding where to make your product available, the price in which to sell it, and the means of which to promote the product.
Offering a product of oral care, the target market is very broad. Crest offers a complete product line, including items for children, which expands their target market. Therefore, the audience that Crest needs to reach would be all people, regardless of age, gender, income level, ethnicity, education, occupation, or geographic location, as long as they do have teeth and have a need for oral care.
With any product comes the possibility of competition. Proctor and Gamble should closely keep an eye on the competitors of the Crest product line, so that they are able to counteract the activities that the competition may do. Competitors for Crest include Colgate, Aim, and several others, although the largest competition is Colgate, a product of the Colgate-Palmolive Company.
The next step is to decide where to sell the product line. The most obvious is to make it available in grocery stores, both the neighborhood stores and the large superstores around the world. In addition, since oral care is
Cited: Colgate Website. Colgate-Palmolive Company. 26 July 2008. < http://www.colgate.com> Crest Website. Proctor and Gamble. 26 July 2008. <http://www.crest.com/home/index.jsp> History of Crest. Proctor and Gamble. 26 July 2008. <http://www.pg.com/company/who_we_are/crest_history.html/>. Proctor and Gamble Website. Proctor and Gamble. 26 July 2008. <http://www.pg.com/> The Structure of Consumer Markets. Author unknown. 26 July 2008. <http://www.instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses>