Case Prep: Adeo Health Science

Key Decision Question: Put yourself in Friedman’s shoes. Which go-to market strategy (medicalized brand through physicians, consumer brand through retailers, digitally native DTC brand) will you choose? Why?

Recommended Supporting Questions and Analysis

Your go-to-market strategy integrates all four “P’s” of the marketing mix, based on your underlying insights and hypotheses about the marketing context and the decision-making processes and preferences of your targeted customers.  So for this final case of the semester, your analysis encompasses concepts from the entire marketing strategy journey.  I strongly encourage you to go back to our “pro-pro” approach to decision analysis, using a common set of criteria across all three options.  

  1. Across all three strategy options, what criteria are important to consider in making this decision? (you may find it useful to set an initial set of criteria before you begin your analysis, and then go back and update it as you work through the questions below)
  2. (Assessing Market Context) What 2-3 key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats are particularly important to keep in mind about the context of this decision? Why did you select these?
  3. (Developing Customer Insight, Segmenting Customers, Innovation Adoption and Demand Forecasting) What are the jobs, and the dimensions of the jobs, that Adeo can do for potential customers? What characterizes customers with these jobs? What is the relative market potential for each customer*job segment?
  4. (Positioning Brand Value) What are the advantages of positioning as a medicalized food brand?  What are the advantages of positioning as a conventional food brand?  What will your brand positioning be?
  5. (Product/Price) What is the fit of the different product packaging/pricing options (single-serve, multi-pack, subscription) with Adeo’s context, targeted customers, chosen brand positioning and go-to-market options?  What will be your packaging?
  6. (Promotion) How will the mission, market, messaging and media of your promotional activity vary across the different options?  What difference in customer acquisition costs might this drive?
  7. (Place) For each of the three go-to-market strategies
    1. What channel benefits are provided to consumers by channel partners?
    2. What is the fit with how these benefits are provided and how your targeted customers want to buy?
    3. How are channel functions and costs for those functions distributed?
  8. (Customer Satisfaction and Customer Equity) Given your analysis above, how might the number of customers, margins, retention rates and customer acquisition costs vary across the three strategy options?
  9. What further information do you wish you had to make your decision?
    1. What assumptions are you making that you are most concerned about?
    2. How wrong would key assumptions have to be to change your decision?
    3. What experiments or other research could you add to the implementation of your strategy to test your assumptions?