Avon Calls on Foreign Market
SUMMARY OF THE CASE STUDY
Avon, started its journey in the early 1886 is now the oldest and the largest marketers and manufactures of the beauty products. The advertisements from “Ding dong, Avon Calling” to “Hello Tomorrow” and from “You never looked so good” to the latest one “The Company For Women”, always helped Avon to improve its image and enhance the marketing strategies to serve the purpose. One of the amazing facts about Avon includes that it’s headquarter is situated in USA but major portion of its sales comes from outside North America. Avon has captured a huge market all over the world and its distributing the beauty solutions to almost all parts of the world. With Avon being a part of 112 countries, the company has approximately 6 million independent sales representatives. These representatives go door-to-door for selling these products.
Fig 1 shows Avon business worldwide.
Fig1. Avon Business Distribution Worldwide
Avon decisions to create a highly distributed organization with regional and national new product development and supply chain operations was initially designed to increase time-to-market and speed of response to regional customers preferences. While that vision of decentralized efficiency and customer focus was a good one at the time, its actual performance is far below expectations and the duplication of effort is slowing down the entire corporation. The case shows how a highly decentralized marketing, new product development and merchandising organizational structure can become more of a liability than an asset however. The intent of this case analysis is to explain and recommend how Avon will be able to attain a higher level of efficiency and profits through more effective alignment of their research & development, new product development strategies, marketing, and ongoing supply chain operations to create a unified, global marketing strategy that will succeed.
QUESTION 1
The chapter describes
Avon, started its journey in the early 1886 is now the oldest and the largest marketers and manufactures of the beauty products. The advertisements from “Ding dong, Avon Calling” to “Hello Tomorrow” and from “You never looked so good” to the latest one “The Company For Women”, always helped Avon to improve its image and enhance the marketing strategies to serve the purpose. One of the amazing facts about Avon includes that it’s headquarter is situated in USA but major portion of its sales comes from outside North America. Avon has captured a huge market all over the world and its distributing the beauty solutions to almost all parts of the world. With Avon being a part of 112 countries, the company has approximately 6 million independent sales representatives. These representatives go door-to-door for selling these products.
Fig 1 shows Avon business worldwide.
Fig1. Avon Business Distribution Worldwide
Avon decisions to create a highly distributed organization with regional and national new product development and supply chain operations was initially designed to increase time-to-market and speed of response to regional customers preferences. While that vision of decentralized efficiency and customer focus was a good one at the time, its actual performance is far below expectations and the duplication of effort is slowing down the entire corporation. The case shows how a highly decentralized marketing, new product development and merchandising organizational structure can become more of a liability than an asset however. The intent of this case analysis is to explain and recommend how Avon will be able to attain a higher level of efficiency and profits through more effective alignment of their research & development, new product development strategies, marketing, and ongoing supply chain operations to create a unified, global marketing strategy that will succeed.
QUESTION 1
The chapter describes