Europet Case Study

EuroPet Case

The product that sold by EuroPet is fuel like gas (predominately premium unleaded fuel, regular fuel and diesel). And they were carried out by two departments, one is the fuel marketing wing, which is account for developing and marketing products that were sold on the forecourt, the other is the retail marketing wing, which is responsible for the c-store marketing. In the recent 20 years, EuroPet has had its own three types of c-stores: compact stores, regular stores and one-stop stores respectively. Although the advertising budget was raised by 50% to 12 million Euros in the last year while the price of products remain lower than that of its rival’s, however, with the competition bought by supermajor energy companies such as PetroAmerica, InterOil, RoyalScandia and “home-branded” gas stations operated by supermarkets like MarcheLocal and Metra, the total market share of EuroPet continued decline during these years.

According to Tyler, who is the new leader of retail marketing department and not satisfactory with the current advertising budget, it is necessary to measure the efficiency of current advertisement so that to determine whether to adjust the marketing strategy in the future. The market share of EuroPet continues to decrease during these years and there must be some irrationality in terms of advertising strategy because of the advertising budget of EuroPet is even higher than that of some supermajor fuel companies The company should find a new way to market its products, at least find a balance between the effectiveness of advertisement and marketing expense as the increasing advertising budget has affected the profitability of the company. Eventually, Tyler and Blanchard agreed that using regression analysis to examine the relationship between c-store sales and advertisement spending.

According to the content of this case, the reason why EuroPet established its own c-stores that attracting more consumers who not only have needs of gas but also convenience items. Although compare to the c-stores of EuroPet, the supermarket is always dominated in terms of both the types and price of items, which is likely to make up for the disadvantage of gas’s price made by gas stations. It could be imagined that most consumers could definitely choose to gas up their cars while shopping in a bigger market because there will be much more choices. Thus, it would be wise to reset the price of items that sold in c-stores while expanding the types of the products as well then emphasize this point in the advertisement to fix the attention of the consumers. Meanwhile, according to Tyler, the effectiveness is really different between setting an advertisement through TV and radio program, which reveals that the company should have a preference when choosing the type of media. Ultimately, it should be proved carefully by the experts that whether the temporary value of multiple factors---3 could be used in most parts of the entire market, or just could be accepted in certain area as EuroPet has a big range of market in the whole Europe. And the market data should be generated from more cities not only Marseille as it is a suitable commercial site to develop business, the data collected from where could not be widely used to reflect current sales and to predict prospect in the future. However, Marseille could be deemed as a pilot market to run some new marketing strategies as a representative of a prosperous market, the experience gained in such a market that how to deal with the competition with certain rivals could be popularized to c-stores in other European markets.