Jones Blair Case

Jones Blair is now looking for a solution to market their architectural paint coatings and sundries. Jones Blair with continuous research and developmental activities produced a very high quality product which is rated very high in the market compare to any other compotators. Their major chunk of sales is from do-it yourself customers that is 50% and professional painters generate about 25% of Jones Blair sales. Though the company is successful year on year increasing its sales, it is seen that sales volume has not changed.

Now, we see that for promoting and improving the sales of architectural paints- Jones Blair employed 8 sales representatives who are responsible for managing the inventory of each retail outlet. Company approximately spends 3% of net sales that is $360,000 on advertising and sales, out of which 55% that is $198,000 is spent on cooperative advertising.

To resolve this issue and come to a conclusion Jones Blair company called for another meeting where VP's of different areas came up with their point of views. Increasing advertisement is one of the easiest option to familiarize the brand name to every households and major sales happen at DFW areas so bringing awareness about the brand is important, but this may not necessarily increase the sales as 75% of them are not buying paints and a recent survey showed that household buyers choose the store first and not the brand. The cost for advertising would almost doubles. I actually would not recommend advertising for this product.

As operations vp said, a price cut of 20%. I don't think so it is a feasible idea, the company is not running in loss but here our main intension is to market the product but at same time not de-grade the brand name by price cutting. It would basically increase the break even dollar.

Increasing the sales representatives at non-DFW markets that would add lots to the company from advertisement point of view and also from sales point of view. Adding sales representative in non-DFW market would also improve in generating new clients. This will improve the sales and also word of mouth advertising is done simultaneously. Though this incurs some additional cost it but too much. Usually sales persons are given targets to achieve and a successful sales person achieves more.

The last option is to do nothing and continue with current strategy/ approach which has been profitable and guarantying the marginal and contribution costs.