The Northwind Company, industry leader and national manufacturer of quality camping products, was established by Paul Clarey in 1975. At the beginning, the company focused on importing inexpensive sporting products and reselling them to discount retailers; then, in 1985, it manufactured a line of high quality tents and backpacking equipment. In addition, it started to expand its distributions around the world by increasing more products to the product line in 1990. To date, the Northwind is regarded as a brand with high quality and dependability.
Lately, the Northwind Company has developed a new product line of quality lawn furniture and decided to launch it by only using print media campaigns. The challenge for the company is to carry over the strong Northwind brand name from camping equipment to lawn furniture. Although the new line of lawn furniture has significant competitive advantages in this marketplace, the company does not utilise its customer database efficiently to proactively market its products and did not realise the importance of salesperson in customers’ perception. Determining a suitable IMC strategy for lawn furniture to overcome the problems is a big issue for the Northwind Company.
The case describes the information of whole industry and the Northwind Company including the statement of company, the new production introduction, some tables about the marketing research information and the advertising decision for the new product line. 2.0 Statement of Main Problem * Level of Analysis
The level of analysis in the case is Level 3, discipline issue, because the present marketing communication tactics are insufficient and ineffective for the Northwind Company to carry over its strong brand name from camping equipment to lawn furniture. Moreover, the company did not utilise its