Askinosie Chocolate - It’s Not About the Chocolate, It’s About the Chocolate

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Market analyse

First of all, we would like to make clear what Askinoise uses as a strategy. Generally, it is based on using natural components for its products. They are taking advantage of this feature and use it as a competitive advantage. Their products are being positioned as luxury products among the chocolate brands in all over the world. It simply applies the fact that they account high quality with high prices as well. This is the basic message this company would like to broadcast towards its customers. Moreover, if we take a look at its webpage it can be seen clearly, that the company pays great attention on having a great design that attracts its customers. The best example to take for instance the visual elements, well-prepared and constructed structure, informative texts and subtitles. Whenever you are selling a product it is really important to define its target group and need to understand its customers if you want to maximize its sales.

I would like to list a wide range of customers who can reach these products. In general, the target groups of these chocolate made products can be both women and men from 18 until any age. As chocolate is very popular with younger age especially its chocolate bars, they are purchased by people under 18 years old as well. The most important target group is the people of United States of America. The number of its customers reached 354 934 people just in the USA. If we consider it worldwide, totally this number reaches 1 427 940.

I also would like to analyse the number of total visits of this small medium enterprise. It contains the visits from desktop and mobile web in the last six months. I would like to depict it in the form of column diagram.

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As I have previously mentioned the vast majority of its customers is from the U.S. . The second place is taken by the United Kingdom whose customers accounts for 4, 75% while Canada is the third place with 3, 45%. Furthermore, the following diagram depicts the rest of the main countries of Askinosie’s Customers.

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Therefore, every company has a competitor or several ones, which are in the same industry and offer similar kind of services or products. Moreover, a competitor attempts to gain larger market share. Competition also requires companies to become more efficient in order to reduce costs. I would like to give the list of the ten most significant competitors of Askinoise company.

www.patric-chocolate.com

www.amanochocolate.com

www.devrieschocolate.com

www.roguechocolatier.com

www.mastbrotherschocolate.com

www.dagobachocolate.com

www.claudiochocolate.com

www.guittard.com

www.springdreams.com

www.humusz.hu

The SWOT

Strengths

- Locally and national renowned entrepreneur

- Socially responsible company

- Product differentiation

- Good control of the quality

Weakness

- Website only in English

- Machine falling slowing down production

- Single origin trading (expensive and risking).

Opportunities

- Expend on direct retail location

- Increase in demand for Luxury customer

- Increase the part of e-commerce

Threats

- Political issues in others countries

New entrant :

- Askinoise started with limited resources & realtivated title knowledge industry

Competitive environment

- Each competitor’s market share:

The chocolate market is composed by an important number of competitors, we can see that the industry chocolate is dominated by Hershey with a market share of 44%.

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- Competitors’ pricing

Brand

Cacao%

Price

Askinosie

65-69%

$ 8.00

Grenada

71%

$ 5.00

Plantation

75%

$ 3.42

Ghiradelli

60-72%

$2.49

Hershey

37-70%

$ 2.39

- Chocolate marketing in United States

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The E-COMMERCE activities

E-commerce is defined as distributing, buying, selling and marketing of products and services over an electronic system. For that the E-businesses can use the Internet, the Extranet/ Intranet and Protocols. The Internet is a unique promotional medium, operating interactive as the Web 2.0 but not in real time. The consumer has more choices and control because the World Wide Web offers nearly complete information’s. E-commerce allows to conceal poor quality, what makes the price-quality trade off hard.

E-commerce has four different sales scenarios. These are Business-to-Consumer, Business-to-Business, Consumer-to-Business and Consumer-to-Consumer. The most significant for Askinosie are B2C and B2B, which require further explanation. As Askinosie sell its products in its