Aspirin Case Summary

Recommendations:
Datril is suggested to position Datril as the alternative to aspirin. Such a positioning will be able to attract current aspirin customers to Datril. The marketing campaign should focus on physicians, trade and patients. It should stress the information of little side effects compared to other analgesic medicine. Both the retail price and the trade price should be lower than Tylenol.

Segmentation and targeting:
Datril should target on aspirin users.
 Datril potential clients could be 1) people currently using aspirin 2) people currently using Tylenol 3) new patients who are looking for analgesic medicine.
 People using aspirin are more price sensitive and have a high bearing point for side effects. People currently
(Exhibit 1)

Positioning and offering:
 Datril is suggested to leverage on its established brand awareness in aspirin-based products and emphasizing on little side-effect as opposed to aspirin-based products when using TV commercials for promotion. This would bring functional value to current aspirin users.
 If Datril adopts the low-priced alternative, considering the $6 million expenditure on advertisement, it would need to sell 13 million bottles (approximately 3% of the sales quantity of aspirin) in order to break-even, an achievable target. (Exhibit 2)
 The low-priced alternative also brings monetary value to aspirin users who might consider shifting to acetaminophen medicine because of the side-effect of aspirin.
 As patients still rely heavily on professional opinion in terms of medicine, pharmacies and physicians play an important role in influencing the choice of patients. By lowering the trade price, pharmacies and other retailers would have a larger margin selling Datril than Tylenol thus would be able to help promote sales of