Task 3: Case Study: The Bottle Swap

Located at North East England, the Bottle Swap is a start-up company that advocates environmental protection and waste reduction. Cooperating with the UK government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, (Department for Environment For Food & Rural Affairs, 2018), the Bottle Swap provides a range of cleaning products which are ecological and recyclable, showing it being committed to promoting the concept of zero waste.

Before formulating the marketing strategies for The Bottle Swap, our film organized an interview with the owner for discussing the brand’s current situation and summarized the below details.

• The Bottle Swap is a newly start-up company in the industry and with small-scale size.
• The founder hopes that her business will have a sustainable development and be able to perform corporate responsibility on different aspects.
• Business growth and be profitable within a year.
• Reach the targeted conversion rate.

Different from the general retailing model, the Bottle Swap not only provides customers with ordinary products but also is embodied with the concept of environmental friendly lifestyle. The targeting of the Bottle Swap tends to look for those who have the same beliefs, instead of the most people who are seeking convenient shopping pathway. (Charlesworth, 2018)

Applying the concept of AIDA model, customers’ purchasing process pass through attention, interest, desire, and action. (see Figure 7) As a start-up brand, the Bottle Swap needs to build awareness and attract more users with similar characteristics as the result of agglomerating a customer base. The source collected from the customer avatar can produce a dependable customer base which is market competitive advantageous. Good customers relationship is one of the key forces in turning into sales. Figure 8 is a created ideal customer avatar for reference.

By understanding the Bottle Swap, most focus points of marketing plan are to increase engagement with more potential consumers and arouse their awareness of the brand so as to increase sales.

When internet is highly expanded, frequent use of mobile phone becomes the norm. (see Figure 9) Using digital marketing to reach audiences is definitely more effective than traditional methods, especially in nowadays pandemic situation. Also, compared with those traditional advertisements which require a lot of money, digital marketing is more appropriate for the Bottle Swap for cost control. Moreover, application of digital marketing can also provide a clear understanding the benefits of each expenditure, regardless of whether these benefits are actual income or other data such as traffic and clicks. This has a major impact on the brand’s future development.

Although the owner is not too enthusiastic about social media, it still can undoubtedly provide the advantage of two-way communication for the brand at this start-up stage. It is necessary to establish a long-term relationship with customers to enhance their attention and good impression of the brand, so that those potential customers are more inclined to the Bottle Swap in the selection process..

Utilizing content marketing on Facebook or Instagram can create different relevant, target-interested contents mainly based on the brand’s identity so as to attract target audiences and generate “eye-catching” contents to draw customers attention. The information released can have a variety of choices in the form of expression, such as text, video, and image etc. Different forms of presentation make the message more impressive for the audiences and are easier to achieve marketing purposes.

In addition to product descriptions and usage guidance, the brand can also hold some interactive activities on social media, such as Q and A sessions, experience sharing sessions, or product exchanges, etc., to increase the audience’s sense of engagement and increase the topicality of the brand.

Other than drawing attention, the Bottle Swap also needs to arouse customers’ curiosity of and interest in its product and trigger their desire to own it. Leading by the attractive contents, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help to improve the ranking of search engine results pages so that brands can reach out to more target customer groups and generate traffic of the website.

Despite of costing concern, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) offers another option for the Bottle Swap’s marketing strategies. SEM works on a paid basis, when there is any user typing a specific word, SEM allows the brand web page to appear on the search page and exposes products and services. As the paid ads are usually placed at the top of the search page, which is actually higher than other organic search results, which means the advertising has a better chance of reaching the user group with the most potentials to buy products or services. And the charge of the SEM is based on pay-per-click (PPC). (Google, 2021) It is believed that the related charges incurred can also be managed in cost control and have achieved the expected effect.