INTRODUCTION

Sweet leaf Bath co, a company that is operated by a mother-daughter duo, Rose Creamer and Stacey Guymer since 2007;produces a range of bath and body care products. They kicked off their sales from local retail stores, exhibitions and craft shows. They reviewed their 2011 annual financial statement in the year 2012 and realized that they were encountering the problem of low sales. The low sale problem was due to the following critical issues:

• Lack of the proper marketing strategiescaused their sales to decline.
• There were not any proper promotional and distributional channels which could boost their sales.
• Consumers had an infinite number of options to choose from eco-friendly bath and body products. The company had at least five regional competitors. For the competition to be tough from Sweet Leaf Bath Co.They had to differentiate their brands from those of competitors.
• Guymer was only able to sell on weekends and evenings because she was only available on a part-time basis which hindered the company’s sales efforts and now they had to focus on sales efforts.
• A low budget of just $5000 was there to execute and carry out or implement their marketing plans.

ANALYSIS

Although, their brand was reliable and well distinguished, they had to adjust their distribution strategies. With the limited resources to execute their strategies, the team had to analyze the other internal and external factors to grow their business which are described below:

Sweat Leaf Bath Co 2012 Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

·        INTERNAL ANALYSIS:

1. The sales were increasing but the profit after tax was poor.
2. They had a poor distribution and a small setup with no former re-order policies.
3. Website traffic had decreased.

·         EXTERNAL ANALYSIS:

1. Being an eco-friendly companyit had a good opportunity to sell their fair-trade certified products.
2. Review their pricing strategy, their prices were on a higher side as compared to peer companies.
3. Fairtrade products had both young and mature consumers.
4. Targeted women consumers were aged between 25-50 years.
5. They had five direct regional competitors.

Decision Criteria

A successful outcome would give them a boost in the sales that they wanted right at that time. The following are the few decision criteria to achieve the outcome:

1. The duo had to design a plan considering their $5000 budget constraint. They would have to make sure that their advertising and promotional expense would cost effective yet efficient.
2. A well-diversified distributors would be needed where they could distribute their budget really well.
3. The distributor which contributed to the most percent of sales would be chosen. Can be seen in exhibit 1.
   

   OPTION ANALYSIS

   ·        ONLINE SALES:

   Keeping $5000 annual budget they had to make some smart decisions to promote their product. Online promotion is considered to be a cost effective and efficient way of promoting a product and they had two options in that category, Etsy and Pristine planet. In exhibit 2, after a thorough analysis we can see that although Pristine had an advantage that it supported ecofriendly products, but 140000 annual unique visitors was of no match with 1.8million annual unique visitors of Etsy...................

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