Marketing Plan for Wooden Products (Eucalyptus)

Thilina Suranga Jayarathne

Organizations spends vast amount of resources to conduct research and gather marketing intelligence to prepare excellent marketing plans. A sensible method to conduct business would to be having a detailed marketing plan which will identify a range of options to achieve the objectives. A well laid out marketing plan will not only enable the organization to beat its competitors but also would be able to gain competitive edge over the competitors. A marketing plan defined as a logical sequence and a series of activities leading to the settings of objectives and formulation of plans for achieving them.
The benefits of carrying a marketing plan is Identification of potential market, Setting objectives for the growth of the organization, Mitigate threats from competitors, Identify resources of competitive advantage and Identify the forces of the changing environment. All of this we can summarize and say that organizations plan to survive the changing needs of the market place. Most firms today monitor the environmental factors and then figures out the best method to overcome threats and exploit opportunities. Confusion between the marketing strategy and marketing tactics, Isolation of marketing functions from operations, Confusion between the marketing function and the marketing concept, Organizational barriers, Confusion between process and output, Lack of knowledge and skills and Hostile corporate culture are some of the barriers for to implement a good marketing plan.
There are several steps to prepare a good management plan. They are i) Marketing audit (where are we now?), ii) Marketing objectives(where do we want to go?), iii) Marketing strategy(how do we get there?), iv) Marketing activities, forecasting and budgeting(how do we ensure arrival). Here the Nuwara-Eliya plantation company is going to introduce a new wooden tile in to the market branded as “LEEtaa”. There objective is to convert the whole final harvest in to a wooden tile. As they have 1290 ha of Eucalyptus, the timber supply will not be a problem. The company is going to recover the capital cost within four rotations (80 years) and to have a 10% profit from the production cost. The marketing plan has calculated all the expected cost and the price of a tile will be Rs. 210.45. It will be a competitive price in the market. But some figures I have been used are completely hypothetical. So we have to do a proper market survey and obtained the actual figures before implementing it.