Order ID | 53563633773 |
Type | Essay |
Writer Level | Masters |
Style | APA |
Sources/References | 4 |
Perfect Number of Pages to Order | 5-10 Pages |
Strategy and Positioning Paper Assignment
In this paper we will discuss the strategy and positioning of Bank of America. Our analysis will include the following: an overview of Bank of America, a description of their product, A SWOT analysis of the organization and offering, A competitive analysis of the organization and offering using Porter’s five competitive forces model, criteria we will use to segment your market and select your target market including geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors, a description of Bank of America’s target market, and needs that cause their target market to buy including emotional and logical drivers. We will also provide a written positioning statement that identifies: your target market, the needs that drive purchase, your organization’s industry category, how they organization solves the target’s needs, your organization’s competition, and what makes our organization different from its competition
“Bank of America, our heritage is woven into our very name. When our earliest predecessor, the Massachusetts Bank, opened for business on July 5, 1784, the United States Constitution had yet to be adopted”, retrieved at (http://about.bankofamerica.com/en-us/our-story/our-heritage.html#fbid=6zqdWmGLWqh). Bank of America is a financial services corporation. Bank of America is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bank of America is the second largest bank in the United States by assets. Bank of America is the 21 largest companies in the United States by total revenue in 2013. In 2010, Forbes recorded Bank of America as the third largest company in the world.
In 2008 Bank of America purchase Merrill Lynch and made Bank of America the world’s largest affluence management corporation and a major player in investment banking. Bank of America is one of the four major banks in the U.S., along with JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, Bank of America’s competitors.
Bank of America is operating in all 50 states of the U.S., and in more than 40 other countries. Bank of America has retail banking that covers just about 80 percent of the U.S. residents and serves in the region of 57 million customers which includes small business. Banks of America has 5,600 banking centers and 16,200 automated teller machines (ATMs).
Bank of America has many banking product and services. Bank of America has personal banking, Check, Savings, CD’s, and Credit Cards, Student banking, Online banking and more like Home Loans. Bank of America also provides Small Business banking needs, like business checking and savings. With small business there are service like payroll services, and tax services. “Every business is different. That’s why Bank of America offers checking accounts that fit your unique needs. For larger, more established businesses, Business Advantage checking is an ideal fit. Business Fundamentals® checking is a better option for a smaller business with more basic needs. With both checking accounts you can access your account anytime, anywhere, from a computer, tablet or smartphone with Online and Mobile Banking”. (Retrieved at http://promo.bankofamerica.com).
Merrill Edge from Bank of America offers the convenience, choice and resources you need to help you manage your finances the way you want; “Preferred pricing: Up to 30 commission-free online equity and ETF trades per month. Integrated banking & investing: Real-time transfers and a consolidated view of your Bank of America banking and Merrill Edge investment accounts and Investment resources: Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research, investment articles, tools and calculators”.
Bank of America target market is every person from personal to small business. Bank of America customers represent one of the most important assets. It is Bank of America’s responsibility as a marketer is to discover the customer, support the customer, and manage the customer with care. With new e-commerce and marketing material offered today, you can use insights to find more potentially valuable customers.
Bank of America will “gain a comprehensive picture of customers and prospects across all channels and Measure and compare a wide array of variables including consumer preferences and demographics Create and refine actionable audiences for consistent, targeted campaigns Cultivate brand loyalty while gaining new insights into high-value customers”.
The SWOT analysis will tell the weakness, strengths, opportunities, and threats.
The strengths for Bank of Americas franchises is it’s a mix of revenue and allows the company to serve a large number if clients. It protects clients from negative risk that could take place. There is multiple walk in locations to satisfy the customer. There a an ever growing weakness, that even though it’s a large number of banks; Bank of America Lacks a decent branch size. The whole sale banking operations are weak in numbers. Weak wholesale banking operations and the ability to compete has become difficult. The Opportunities within the business present as follows. There is plenty expansion in the markets. There is a lot of room for consolidation. You will find there is also a lot of ability to grow and borrow. The threats that are presented are as follows: financial economic difficulty, and competition from other banks and credit unions.
Market division is honed by most organizations in one structure or an alternate, as a method for streamlining their showcasing system by isolating wide based target markets into particular gatherings of shoppers, and formulating promoting systems that will speak to each one gathering. Plainly characterized business sector division criteria not just guarantee that clients are more inclined to distinguish and buy the item that is a good fit for them; it likewise minimizes wastage of assets, diminishing the time used promoting the wrong items to the wrong clients. It is imperative, be that as it may, to center assets on business sector portions whose size, development and benefit is great, both quickly and in the long run.
The accompanying are the business division criteria ought to be valuable when arranging the organization’s business division system
Measurable
Business sector portions are generally measured regarding deals worth or volume. Solid statistical surveying ought to have the capacity to distinguish the span of a business sector portion to a sensible level of correctness, with the goal that strategists can then choose whether, how, and to what degree they ought to center their endeavors on showcasing to this section.
Considerable
A feasible business sector portion is generally a homogenous gathering with plainly characterized qualities, for example, age bunch, socio-investment foundation and brand observation. Life span is additionally paramount here: no business sector division master would suggest focusing on a temperamental client aggregate that is liable to scatter, or change to the point of being unrecognizable inside a year or two.
Open
At the point when differentiating a business portion, it is essential to consider how the gathering may be gotten to and, significantly, whether this falls inside the qualities and capacities of the organization’s advertising division. Diverse sections may react better to outside publicizing, online networking battles, TV infomercials, or any number of different methodologies.
Differentiable
A perfect business sector portion ought to be inside homogeneous yet remotely heterogeneous. Contrasts between business sector fragments ought to be plainly characterized, so the battles, items and promoting devices connected to them could be actualized without cover.
Geographic division
This is the division of the business as per diverse topographical units like mainland’s, nations, districts, areas or neighborhoods. This type of division furnishes the advertiser with a snappy depiction of buyers inside a delimited territory. Understanding social contrasts between nations could be critical for business achievement, thus advertisers will need to tailor their methods as indicated by where customers are.
Demographic division
An extremely prominent manifestation of partitioning the business is through demographic variables. Understanding who purchasers are will empower you to all the more nearly distinguish and comprehend their needs, item and administrations use rates and needs. Understanding who shoppers are obliges organizations to partition customers into gatherings focused around variables, for example, sexual orientation, age, salary, social class, religion, race or family lifecycle.
Psycho-demographic division
Not at all like demographic division techniques that portray who is obtaining an item or administration, psycho-demographic division endeavors to answer the “whys” with respect to purchaser’s buying conduct. Through this division methodology markets are partitioned into gatherings focused around identity, lifestyle and qualities variables. Portioning buyers into lifestyles is focused around the thought that an individual’s lifestyle has an immediate effect on their investment in items and administrations.
Behavioral division
This procedure partitions markets into customer gatherings focused around their utilization, reactions, information and mentality towards items and administrations. There are six primary strategies through which advertisers can partition the business sector as indicated by behavioral variables. Case in point, Expedia offers occasion bundles as indicated by the diverse sorts of encounters individuals need to have.
Target market portrayal
A target business is a particular gathering of individuals that you have dead set to be some piece of your client base. These projections are focused around demographic studies and statistical surveying done with different specimen bunches. There are a few elements utilized within deciding a target market.
Geography
This might be restricted to help focus your target market. At the point when utilizing geology as your target business, verify that your item is something that will speak to a wide run of different sorts of shoppers.
Age
As individuals develop more established, their tastes and inclination change. Managing an account is an industry that often utilizes the age demographic to focus a target market. Age is a demographic that gets particular to different components as well. Blending.
The industry category for the Bank of America falls under the finance and banking category.
A decent understanding of the standards of business sector division is an imperative building piece of your organization’s advertising system – the establishment for a productive, streamlined and eventually fruitful methodology to clients, and a method for focusing on your items and administrations faultlessly, with the base of wastage.
Bank of America is one of the world’s largest holding bank companies in terms of 2013 assets and total revenue. Bank of America is a giant in the financial industry that is the backbone of most economies worldwide. Among the nation’s largest banks by assets alongside with JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, Bank of America operates one of the country’s most extensive branch networks with some 5,300 locations and more than 16,300 ATMs. The Bank of America services include consumer and small business banking, corporate banking, credit cards, mortgage lending and auto financing car loans. Also available is online banking to help millions of active users either on computer, laptop, and mobile to pay bills.
What make Bank of America different from it competition, for instance, Wells Fargo? Wells Fargo has more employees 230,533 while Bank of America has 167,162. The number of locations in the United States alone for Wells Fargo is 6,289 while Bank of America has 5,377. The total deposits for Wells Fargo are $1.01 trillion while Bank of America has $1.09 trillion. Wells Fargo has a monthly fee as well as Bank of America.
A lot of former and present customers are unsatisfied banking with Wells Fargo due to so many outrageous fees, having problems with open account, and have had bad experience with customer service. As for Bank of America, the former and present customers are and still having issues on banking with Bank of America.
Wells Fargo is facing numerous lawsuits including some alleging discrimination in home lending, and course Wells Fargo will deny it. Although Wells Fargo still leads in the mortgage lending, its market share has shrunk from it’s roughly 25% peak in 2012, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
The needs that drive purchase
The needs that drive customers are the safety of knowing that their life savings will be protected. Customers don’t want to have to worry about if their money is in a safe place. A peace of mind is one of the most important factors when dealing with banks. Customers also purchase checks for convenience. It’s quite easy to write a check and continue on with your day. Going back and forth to the ATM machine can be a drag. Another thing that drives customers to come on board is the promotional offers, such as signing up for a checking account with direct deposit and receives 150.00. That’s an awesome offer to go for. Many banks are successful when they offer this promotion.
Your organization’s industry category
My organizations industry category is banking. Banking appeared to be a competitive industry. Different banks offer different promotions. Some savings accounts are free with direct deposit some are not. Usually customers sign up with banks that don’t have a lot of fees.
How your organization solves the target’s needs
Bank of America solves the targets needs by supplying a customer care call center. There is a walk in center if customers don’t feel comfortable discussing their personal information over the phone. As I understand everything that has to do with banking can’t always be done over the phone or on the internet. Although Bank of America is slowing changing things so that it suits the client’s needs. Location is significant when looking for a bank to handle funds. Clients enjoy a friendly and helpful environment. There are several things that play a part in whether or not someone wants to use a certain bank.
We have shown: an overview of Bank of America, a description of their product, A SWOT analysis of the organization and offering, A competitive analysis of the organization and offering using Porter’s five competitive forces model, criteria we will use to segment your market and select your target market including geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors, a description of Bank of America’s target market, and needs that cause their target market to buy including emotional and logical drivers. We will also provide a written positioning statement that identifies: your target market, the needs that drive purchase, your organization’s industry category, how they organization solves the target’s needs, your organization’s competition, and what makes our organization different from its competition. We also have identified that Bank of America even though it consists of a large group of nationwide branches usually lake branch size and amenities. I would like to leave you with a quote, As Galen De Young of prometus marketing states, “Without a clear and strong positioning strategy, lots of time and money are spent in vain—not just marketing dollars, but nearly every other corporate investment, from production and distribution right down to overhead expenses. Because positioning strategy is your reason for being. If you can’t clearly articulate your positioning, and if it doesn’t have real, meaningful, differentiated value to the marketplace and your organization, you’re not only drifting somewhat aimlessly, your chances of real success are greatly diminished.”
Reference
Bank of America has a full range of products and service to offer its customers. Checking accounts is one of the products Bank of America has to offer to consumers. As the market grows Bank of America will adapt to its customer’s Banking needs as it has done since 1784. Bank of America products and services are at a great value and Bank of America has different price ranges for the product and services to meet the needs of their clientele.
Bank of America has a full range of checking accounts to meet the needs of their clientele, from personal checking to business checking accounts. Checking account holders have access their account at a branch, ATM, or online and online chat. With Mobile banking customers can make deposit from their smart phones, manage their account from their phones and now Bank of America has text banking.
Everyone has banking needs and Bank of America has many ways to access and use the products and services that Bank of America offers. Having so many ways to bank helps meet the needs of customers day to day banking because most of their banking can be done online. With direct deposits and mobile deposits customer don’t have to worry about cashing their paycheck or any check the old fashion way by going to the local bank branch.
Also with Bank of Americas bill pay service, customers can pay their bills online or with their mobile device. Customers can also set up ongoing payments with bill pay so they never have to worry about their bills being late. Bank of America offers ebilling were your bills can come to your email inbox with Bank of America. With debit cards you can pay bills or shop online.
Bank of America now offers email or mobile money transfers, for example I can email money to my daughter’s checking account without having to drive to the bank or calling customer service to transfer money. Or I can link her account with mine and just transfer money to her account on my mobile phone. Bank of America’s checking accounts has all their customers’ needs covered.
The product lifecycle is a model that explains what happens as a product undergoes different stages in the market place. Most of the products go through the major stages of development which start off with idea conceptualization (development stage), then follow the growth stage in which the new product starts to gain more market share and the profits starts to increase as a result. After the growth phase, a product will enter the maturity phase in which most of the market population know about the product and there is no significant growth in the customer growth base. Then it’s followed by the recession stage or the decline stage which if not well addressed will lead to the product being laid off or bought off by other competitive firms. In this case, the bank of America is introducing the checking accounts in which it encourages the customers to open up accounts with them that will help them in saving and withdrawals of any amounts in future. This product will follow the lifecycle in the stages stated above and different strategies will be used in each stage as discussed below.
First of all in the introduction stage, the customers do not know about the product. It’s the work of the bank staff to make the public aware of the product. They can use sales team such as personal selling, direct marketing or even the advertisements in different Medias to make the public aware and to encourage or motivate them to open an account with them. Strategies to use in this stage are the market penetration strategy or the market skimming strategy. Market penetration is the use of quite low initial prices that will encourage the market share to open up account aimed at gaining a large market share. Skimming on the other hand is using high prices to get the maximum out of the market share.
The product will now enter the growth stage in which the market population is now much aware of the product and many of them have subscribed to it. Sales figures are shooting up but there is still the urge to continue advertising to attract more. Promotional activities such as discounts on the savings made or even discounted withdraw charges will encourage the customers to open accounts. The issue here is to check what competitive firms are charging for similar products and set prices such that you attract more customers while keeping the sales figures good.
The maturity stage is whereby the level of sales level has leveled up and that the product is well established. The main concern here is to maintain the customer base. Product modification and differentiation as well as major advertisement strategies will be embarked on. The product can be remodified or even some more benefits can be added to encourage the customer on staying with bank of America rather than go to other banks. Advertisement remains a valid option of promoting the product in order to differentiate the product from the competitors and to increase market share. However, the marketing activity and expenditure levels may be much lower than earlier on in the lifecycle.
The decline stage is the last stage in which the company’s sales figure increases at a decreasing rate. The sales amount starts to decline. This will mostly be as a result of changes in tastes and preference in which people opt for other services rather than the checking accounts. The firm must now remodify the product or decide to withdraw the product from the market due to decline in sales and greatly reduced market share. Since the product is consuming more resources than it can return, companies can still make some profit by switching to less-expensive products or entering some new and cheaper markets.
The channels of distribution we will use are important, and yes the product is a simple checking account but marketing channels are still important to the deliverance of the product. A marketing channel is like on slice of the total marketing pie. Distribution is also one of the four very important “Four Ps of Marketing”: promotion, product, price, and placement or as we are talking about distribution. So even though we are talking about a Bank of America service; such as a checking account, we still need to make sure we are using the proper channels to distribute the product, to the proper consumers.
The recent surge in last ten year of ecommerce and the loosening of restrictions on those that cannot get a bank account has opened a whole new target customer. People who have never needed a bank account now are finding life difficult without one. As a major player in the banking World Bank of America’s target customer for its new checking accounts are these people. We plan to use our gigantic network of, 5,800 branches and 18,000 ATMs to attack and service our new customers for these accounts. We can reach these customers through their local markets with our retail branches and by using a list of our past declined applicants for account to mail them offers to try to get an account with us now. Using our financial planning network we recently acquired from our Merrill Lynch acquisition we can use a checking account education program to get them into accounts.
A product is defined as “Anything that has the capacity to provide the satisfaction use or perhaps the profit desired by the customer.” Product and services are the words used interchangeably in the banking parlance. The bank products are deposits into checking account, borrowing and or other product like debit cards. Better service is more important than just a good product in the marketing of banking service, so the focus should be on the want and need of satisfying that product or service. The different products and services of banking is that deposits are accepted public. The banks open account of those people who deposits into their checking account with the bank. The marketing approach to banking services is identifying the customer’s financial needs and wants, develop appropriate banking products and services to meet customer’s needs. Determine the prices for the products and services developed advertise and promote the product to existing and potential customer of financial services. Set up suitable distribution channels and bank branches, and forecasting and research of future market needs. The discussion of bank marketing, it can understood that the existence of the bank has little value without the existing of customers. Customers are attracted through promises and are retained through satisfaction of expectation, needs and wants. Marketing as related to banking is to define an appropriate promise to a customer through a range of products and or services. Customer awareness is also challenge before the banks; bank can market their product and services by giving the proper knowledge about the product to customer or by awarding the customer about the products. The banking sector reforms have changed the traditional way of doing banking business. Mainly because technology is the outcome of banking reforms, with the introduction of new products and services competition has grown up among the banks. The banks will survive by facing competition with the effective ways of banking.
Everyone has banking needs and important reasons why they utilize bank services. Money is always safe and accounted for. Customer never has to worry about missing money. I know long ago many people kept their money under a mattress or in a dresser. Today in 2014 there are more safe ways to save money without worrying about a break in. Banks also play a huge part in college funds, being able to set money aside out of our pay check is very helpful in so many ways. Writing a check is convenient and easier when processing a transaction. Banks now make it easier to process a check through our cellular device which is awesome. Over all banks are needed and plays a significant role in our everyday life.
References
www.journalofcommerceandtrade.com
Mind Tools. (2012). “The Product Life Cycle: Managing your Product to Maximize Success”
Levitt, J. (1985) “Product life cycle, Harvard Business Review,” vol 44, pg 84–91.
Dhalla, D. Yuspeh, M. (1966) “Forget the product life cycle concept,” Oxford Review
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