Vistakon is a well-established market leader in the disposable contact lens industry. It is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson and has grown from a specialty manufacturer in 1987 with $20 million annual sales to a market leader in the contact lens industry in 1993 with over $250 million sales. It offers a variety of disposable contact lenses ranging from a disposable time of two weeks, one week and now with 1-Day Acuvue, one day. The idea of 1-Day Acuvue came about because there was a lot of hassle associated with long term lenses, including enzyme build up and cleaning. Although the development of one week and two week disposable lenses also had the same ideology behind their development, 1-Day Acuvue was different as it did not require any storage at all or contact solutions and represented maximum convenience in terms of contact lenses. There are of course potential problems in the launch of this product that can be avoided by mapping out the buying process of the lenses. We are able to analyze all potential channels a customer comes in contact with and which ones could influence their decision positively or negatively. Once we are able to remove the potential hurdles from one channel to another, we will be able to have a successful launch. We will look at pricing, promotion and influencing ECPs to be on board with our product as ways for these hurdles to be minimized and removed. We refer to our test market launches as they are crucial in helping us decide so many imperative issues before we decide to launch our product on a larger scale.
PEST Analysis
After doing the PEST analysis, the trends noticed are the popularity of soft contact lenses with around 73% of contact lenses users opting for soft lenses as compared to the hard ones. The hard ones were cheaper and more uncomfortable but could correct some vision deficiencies that soft lenses could not.
It was observed that people did not wear lenses because of the fear of lenses,