Women's Shoe Store Marketing Plan

Passion Soles

Marketing Strategy

Part of Passion Soles' marketing strategy will be based solely on location. Passion Soles is located in a trendy mall that receives abundant walk-through traffic. This location will cost a premium and will not be directly linked to the marketing budget as rent has been categorized under general overhead.

Another form of marketing to be described later in detail will be advertising. The strategy of the marketing campaign is to increase the target customer's awareness of Passion Soles.

Passion Soles' mission is to provide Tacoma with an upscale selection of women's shoes and outstanding customer service. We exist to attract and maintain customers. When we adhere to this maxim, everything else will fall into place. Our services will exceed the expectations of our customers.

• Increase repeat customers by 7% per quarter.
• Decrease customer acquisition costs by 8% per year.
• Build an effective pull campaign, bringing in new customers at an increased rate of 9% per quarter.

• Experience a double digit growth rate for the first three years.
• Reduce store overhead by 5% each year.
• Reach profitability by the end of year two.

Passion Soles is targeting two population segments within the broad category of the fashion conscious female with disposable income.

• Professionals: these are full time working professional women. They typically earn more than $45,000 themselves. They will purchase shoes for the workplace as well as for leisure time. This group is being targeted as they work full time and therefore have the need for many different pairs of shoes for all of their different outfits. They also have the money to spend on shoes and will take advantage of this reality as women typically love to collect lots of shoes.

• Housewives: this segment has plenty of disposable income because of their husbands. These women love shoes, and spend fair amounts of time shopping for shoes and clothing. The household income of this group is $60k-$150k, generally toward the higher end of this range. This group is attractive because they have the money and the time to shop for shoes. With both money and time, there is no limit to the number of cool shoes that they would like to own.

Passion Soles will position itself as the premier outlet for women's fashionable shoes, providing Tacoma with the largest selection, rivaling some of the boutiques in Seattle. Passion Soles will leverage their competitive edge to achieve this desired positioning.

Passion Soles' competitive edge is an unmatched selection in Tacoma. This selection will be achieved in two ways. The first is a very specific effort to carry as many styles of shoes as possible. Passion Soles recognizes that Tacoma currently does not have a single store that offers a wide selection of decent quality shoes for the fashion conscious woman consumer. The competitive edge is the recognition of this unserved niche and the serving of this demand.

Passion Soles will be able to offer a large selection through a unique inventory model that stocks a large number of styles with only one size per style. The advantage to this is that for the same amount of money that Passion Soles invests in overhead, they can offer far more styles.

This model is effective because women will buy shoes based on style. The way a shoe fits is of little consequence if it looks good. For this reason women are willing to order a pair of shoes sight seen but not fitted. Passion Soles offers two day delivery with an additional expense rush overnight option.

Passion Soles' marketing strategy will seek to create customer awareness regarding the products that they offer, develop the customer base, and work toward building customer loyalty and referrals.

The message that Passion Soles will seek to communicate is that they offer the largest selection of fashionable women's shoes in Tacoma. Women no longer need to travel to Seattle to find nice shoes. The first method that Passion Soles will use to communicate this is location. Passion Soles has chosen an upscale, trendy mall that receives a lot of walk through traffic. This generates large amounts of visibility for Passion Soles.

Another method of communication is advertisements in Tacoma's daily newspaper. The advertisements will be placed in the weekly fashion section whose readership is primarily women.

The last method of communication will be through a strategic relationship Passion Soles will develop with one of the upscale women's clothes stores. The two stores will be co-branding their products as clothes and shoes are intuitively linked. Often times shoes are purchased to go with the new outfit. The strategic alliances will be used to acquaint customers of the trendy clothes stores with Passion Soles as the customer demographics are quite similar. The alliances will include discounts when both shoes and clothing are purchased as well as display some of each company's products at the other store. These activities are all designed to develop visibility on behalf of the marketing plan.

Passion Soles marketing mix is comprised of the following approaches to pricing, distribution, advertising and promotion, and customer service.

• Pricing: Passion Soles pricing is designed to be competitive to the other fashion shoe retailers.
• Distribution: All shoes will be distributed to Passion Soles store front. While this will necessitate a second trip for the customer to come and pick up the shoes, it allows Passion Soles to offer a much wider selection than any of the competition.
• Advertising and Promotion: Location, targeted advertising in the newspaper and strategic alliances will serve as the foundation of Passion Soles advertising and promotion effort.
• Customer Service: Exceeding customer's expectations is the company's mission.

During the initial phases of the marketing plan development, several focus groups were carried out to help gain insight into the most prized customer and some of their decision-making processes as they relate to shoe purchases. The information collected from the focus groups has been extremely helpful to Passion Soles and help justify the business model.

An additional source of market research is a comprehensive survey that has been distributed to an upscale women's clothes retailer's customers. A mathematics graduate student was used in the development of the survey ensuring the survey was statistically significant and relevant. The survey was also quite insightful into the mind of a prospective customer.