Saxonville Sausage Company is a 70-year-old privately held family business headquartered in Saxonville, Ohio. Saxonville produces a variety of fresh pork sausages including bratwurst, breakfast sausage, and an Italian Sausage named “Vivio”. Since 2004 bratwurst and breakfast sausages have been flat seeing a 0% volume increase nationwide, with little or no growth expected in the short-term. However, Italian sausage was the one category showing growth with a 9% increase in 2004 and 15% in 2005. New product marketing director Ann Banks has been given the task to launch a national Italian sausage brand under the Vivio name or as a new brand in order to achieve Saxonville’s profit objectives for the next fiscal year. Banks ran a four-step market research process using Saxonville’s target market to get a better idea of where their Italian Sausage brand should be positioned.
After analyzing the research, Banks discovered that “Family Connection” and “Clever Cooking” were the two favorites among the target consumers. Banks should decide to use the Family Connection brand positioning under the Vivio brand name. Family Connection is the stronger option because qualitative findings from the focus group shows that the target market for Italian sausage is female head-of-households who create dinners to satisfy the whole family and enjoy spending time with their family. Positioning the brand to target families will increase consumer awareness and lead to increased sales.
Family Connections is a much stronger brand position than Clever Cooking because of the results from the four–step market process performed with the target consumers. In the early stages of the research, the focus group, consisting of the heavy, medium, and light users, all stated that Italian sausage “was the one meal they prepared that they did not need to call the family to the table to eat.” Respondents also reported their ideal dinner consists of wholesome and appealing meals