Natureview is a reputed company in the market for selling high quality product with great taste and flavour through nature food store channels. It has increased its annual revenues from $100,000 to $13,000,000 in a span of 10 years. It has achieved this growth by selling high quality refrigerated, flavoured organic yogurt to the niche consumers. During the initial years of its operation, it had struggled to maintain a consistent level of profitability. In 1997, it received the fund from a venture capitalist firm and since then it has been able to maintain leadership in the market. After 3 years of receiving funds, it is a trouble for Natureview to know that the VC firm is withdrawing its money from the company. So it is imperative for Natureview …show more content…
To achieve the target in just over 12 months, Natureview must make numerous strategic marketing decisions. One of the options is to expand their product distribution through the supermarket channel within the northeast, midwest, southeast and west regions of the US. The distribution in the supermarket channel has four steps where the manufacturer sells the product to the distributor who sells the product to the retails and finally to the consumers. An 8-oz and a 32-oz yogurt sell for $0.74 and $2.70 while a 4-oz cup multipack can sell for $2.85. The supermarket channel is much more tech-savvy as compared to the natural food stores. They use scanning devices, automated inventory tracking systems to organize channel product flow. The new make profit manufacturers entering the channel has to pay a $10,000 slotting fee for each SKU per retail chain in each of the four regions. The channel also demands quarterly from every manufacturer to contribute funds to the cooperative weekly trade promotions, averaging $8000 nationally per ad, per retailer chain. Moreover, if the product doesn’t