Ice Cream Competitive Analysis

Executive Summary This project focuses on finding ways of making P&P a more competitive company. To do this I interviewed P&P’s management in order (i) to understand the company and its decision making process, and (ii) to get data that are important for my analysis. Furthermore, I conducted a field research in an attempt to understand consumer habits, tastes and price sensitivity when it comes to ice cream. Moreover, I went through relevant literature about marketing strategy and case studies of international ice cream brands in order to get an idea of how a successful ice cream company operates abroad. It was obvious from the findings I got from my management research that this is a company that operates from “gut-feeling” as opposed to being a consumer-orientated firm and that they are situated in a densely populated market whose type of environment is a “Volume Business”. In addition to this, even though P&P is the market leader in ice cream in general, as well as, the market leader in bulk and family ice cream, their individual ice cream line has only 19% of the market share. My research findings showed that consumers rank P&P low when it comes to variety and that P&P’s newly (about a year old) launched premium ice cream line “Nostalgia” suffers from a lack of brand recognition, as well as, an inadequate pricing policy; i.e. it is priced too low for a premium ice cream line and this has an effect on (i) perceived quality and (ii) the right return one would expect from a premium product. As a result, my recommendation at the end is that P&P needs to start a price war on the individual ice cream line to weaken its competition, go public to raise capital in an attempt to pursue an aggressive market penetration strategy, where “Nostalgia” ice cream shops need to open at prime locations all over Cyprus and promote their brand more intensely, while increasing their variety and improving R&D in the company.

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