Assignment Task: The pampeano Sustainable Positioning Project
The Oxford Brookes Brand Consultancy (OBBC) has acquired a good reputation in the
marketing industry. This must have been the reason why within the space of just a few weeks OBBC has been approached by several organisations to pitch for a brand positioning project.
OBBC is a pretty new and small brand management consultancy consisting of a group of lecturers and practitioners from various marketing disciplines. Since they don’t have the capacity to work on several pitches at the same time, they urgently need your help.
The OBBC team knows that in terms of its capacity it could only work for one more client in 2022. However, the OBBC team is not sure which of the brand positioning projects they should pitch for. This is where you come in. They decide to hire up-and-coming brand management experts on a freelance basis. So, they are asking you to look at pampeano, a luxury lifestyle brand, which is one of the organisations that recently approached OBBC. pampeano is an established brand in the leather fashion accessories market and beyond.
They never want to stand still because their markets are permanently evolving and changing.
They always want to be ahead of the competition and know what the ‘big picture’ changes and the important ‘zeitgeist’ trends are.
Therefore, OBBC is pitching now to help pampeano prepare for a positioning that takes latest thinking in sustainability into account, particularly for Gen-Zs. Due to time constraints, OBBC decides to focus for the initial pitch phase on the pampeano-branded leather belt product range only and geographically on the UK market only. For more details, see www.pampeano.co.uk
Your task is to write a report about the pampeano brand in the UK and the Gen-Z target audience. For that you need to analyse the brand as a whole. After that, when it comes to your strategic recommendations and implementation ideas, you should focus exclusively on the leather belt product range only (this will be further specified in class) due to the limited word count of your report.
ANALYSIS: What is this brand about? What are the key meanings, manifestations
and stakeholders of the brand? What does the ‘product’ portfolio currently look like?
What are the brand’s current vision, mission and core values? What are the
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? How is the brand currently
positioned? Your analysis is expected to look at a variety of elements of the brand.
This should include the brand’s IDEOLOGY, CAPABILITIES, CONSUMERS/STAKEHOLDERS, COMPETITION and ENVIRONMENT.
STRATEGY: Based on your analysis, you are expected to discuss two different
potential future positioning options for the brand (i.e. the whole leather belt range)
which reflect latest sustainability thinking and could be established in the UK market
in autumn/winter 2022.
You then need to justify which of the discussed positionings
has the most potential, i.e. you need to choose one positioning option and justify your
decision. You can extend a positioning strategy that already exists, but you need to
justify why this is the best option.
Finally, you are expected to make suggestions as
to how the brand positioning idea could be transformed into strategic frameworks that can be used to brief the client’s marketing team who need to bring this positioning idea to life. In this context you must apply one or more of the following frameworks:
(a) Vision, Mission & Values; (b) Brand Pyramid; and/or (c) Transformation Grid.
IMPLEMENTATION: Based on your strategic framework(s), you need to develop
and explain implementation activities to show how, for example, the client’s UK
marketing team could implement the framework with different specific stakeholders.
This needs to contain an activity in terms of co-creative new product development.
One implementation activity needs to utilise social media-based communications or
other latest digital technology
