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The New Beetle: Volkswagen's Management Problem

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The New Beetle: Volkswagen's Management Problem
This paper is case study of The New Beetle form harvard business school. It is for marketing research class. This paper define Volkswagen's Management problem and the question that design for solve the problem.
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The idea of Volkswagen (VW) Beetle was designed so everyone can have a car of their own. Volkswagen kept that idea in mind to build New Beetle. When Volkswagen tries to bring New Beetle to public, management’s problem was to know the consumer’s expectations for New Beetle. They need to use marketing research to find out who will in their target market and what target market preferences are. After first step, then another problem is how management going to use those data to help them to understand what improvement does New Beetle needs in order to meet consumer’s expectations and management needs to know the demand on New Beetle. At last, management needs to position New Beetle in positive image in order to get high sell in market.

Marketing research objective: In order to solve management problems, there are few objectives that Volkswagen’s managements need to focus on when they doing their marketing research. To Begin with they need to (1) Identify the target market, (2) Find out what the target market’s preference of small car, (3) Find out customer expectations from new Beetle, (4) Know what the reasons are that people want to buy New Beetle. The Volkswagen New Beetle was introduced to U.S market in 1998 (Wikipedia.org). Before launching the New Beetle, the team needed to design New Beetle to look like the original Beetle in order to bring back people’s memory about one of the most successful cars in the world. The New Beetle takes style and shape of the original Beetle to become a stylish and fashionable compact car.

Key factors:
There are different ideas between original Beetle and New Beetle. To compare their key factors in order to find out what management style is

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