In the effort to successfully re-position its Crush brand, Cadbury Beverages should consider the following courses of action:
1. Increase spending on advertising and promotion for its diet segment, especially the orange diet. There is real opportunity for Crush to expand and eventually gain a larger share of this market. Previous records show that Crush’s three leading competitors have neglected to spend money on advertising their diet soft drinks. Focused advertising and promotions on its diet segment will give Crush an upper advantage in boosting diet sales and creating awareness among diet orange soft drink consumers when other competitors are absent. Implementation of this action would require Crush to increase advertising expenditures by as much as $10,000,000 to remain competitive in the market among Mandarin Orange Slice and Minute Maid Orange. Majority of this expenditure should be focused on diet, an area in which Crush stands to gain competitive advantage as its being neglected by competitors. Currently, 28.7 percent of Crush’s sales are diet, while 71.3 percent of Crush’s sales are regular.
2. Change the audience that their promotions and advertising are targeting. Crush and Sunkist currently target the same segment, which are teens, roughly ages 12-29, this could lead to cannibalism of sales for Sunkist. For its re-launch, Crush should change its target audience to young adult, ages 18-39. This would put Crush in a position for fiercer competition and would decrease the chances of cannibalizing sales within the company.
3. Due to Cadbury’s revitalized bottler network efforts, which will take effect when Crush is re-launched, Crush will be available in markets that represent 75 percent of the total orange category sales. In order to gain a competitive advantage, Crush needs to gain an additional 17 percent of market coverage from bottlers in the orange category, resulting in 92 percent total market coverage. The current leading competition occupies 91 percent of total market coverage.