Question

Case Study: Toyota in Oman

The Marketing task:

Over the years, the Toyota brand has been managed by the Saud Bahwan Group(SBG) in Oman, who continue to build on the brand by ensuring that it does not only excel in product excellence, but also in customer satisfaction. Toyota is now considered to be one of the most trusted brands in Oman.

In keeping with its brand promise of ‘exceeding customer expectations’, Toyota has recently introduced an ‘innovative and class-leading Hybrid sedan’, the Toyota Prius, spearheading a new era in hybrid technology across the Middle East.

As a Marketing Consultant, you have been approached by the CEO of the Saud Bahwan Group (SBG) to develop a Marketing Plan for the Toyota Prius Brand which will enable the company to achieve even better customer satisfaction over the next three years.

Your Marketing Plan must include the following:

Executive Summary
Introduction and objectives – Your introduction should include relevant background information on Toyota in Oman
Current market and company situational analysis, including the competition (apply Porter’s Five Forces model), consumer behaviour, SWOT and/or PEST analyses.
Market Segmentation– this should emanate from your market situational analysis. You must identify current and possibly new market segments for Toyota Prius
Marketing Plan Objectives – must be specific and realistic. Apply the SMART Rule.
Marketing mix strategy recommendations– Note that you will need to recommend your marketing mix strategy for Toyota Prius. Your recommendations should stem from the market and company situational analysis. Your strategy recommendations must be relevant to the segments identified in your market situational analysis. You are also expected to use relevant strategic marketing planning tools to inform your recommendations.
Evaluation and Control – how would the plan be monitored? What tools would you employ? Consider the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Budget– provide a costing for each of your marketing mix strategy. I do not expect you to come up with specific figures, but your costing should be based on research.

Answer/Solution:

1.0 Introduction and Objectives

Currently, Oman is ranked third in terms of the size of their automotive market in Middle East after Saudi Arabia and UAE (Motoshow 2016 Oman, 2016). It is projected that the Oman automotive sector growth rate would stabilize at 7.5% annually in future. In the country, cars represent 70% of the total automotive imports from the world (Muscat Daily, 2018). This has strategically placed the country as a regional hub for used cars, vehicle parts and other automobiles components in GCC region. In terms of car brands in the Oman market, they include Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai. In 2017, the share of the new car sales for the brands included 50%, 19.2%, and 7.5% respectively (Motoshow 2016 Oman, 2016) demonstrating that Toyota is the leading brand. The company advancement in this market can be attributed to its product excellence, customer-centric marketing and innovativeness pioneered by the Saud Bahwan Group management. As a strategy of exceeding customer satisfaction as enshrined in their branding, the company has recently introduced an innovative and class-leading Hybrid Sedan Toyota Prius. The objective of this report is to develop a marketing plan for Toyota Prius to enable Toyota Company in achieving improved customer satisfaction.

2.0 Current Market and Company Situational Analysis

The internal and external business environment demonstrates characteristics of a particular market and an entity situational analysis (Zhu et al. 2013). Figure 1 below highlights some of the internal and external business environment factors.

Figure 1: Internal and External Business Environment

Source: Author

2.1 Competitors

From a general perspective, in terms of market share, the major competitors in Oman car market include Toyota (50%), Nissan (19.2%), and Hyundai (7.5%). Other competitors include Germany’s BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, and Honda which cumulatively account for 20% of market share (Amitha et al., 2017). In this case, despite Toyota representing a significant percentage, the level of competition is still elastic. In this level of operation, the nature of competition is monopolistic with competitors including Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Lexus, Ford, FUSO among others is as shown in figure 2 below;

Figure 2: Competition in Oman

Source: https://www.slideshare.net/MaddyBasha/oman-automotivemarketreport

2.2 SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Due to its size, it benefits from economies of scale. It is the first company to introduce the “Just in Time” production approach for reducing production costs and responding to customer demands (Battini et al., 2013). This is coupled by the organizational culture that harnesses a rapid innovation such as Prius which is the first hybrid vehicle in Middle East.

Weaknesses

The most evident weaknesses include different needs of Oman car buyers from those in Japan, America and UK. Toyota company is still interconnected with the headquarter denying the company flexibility in operating through an optimum flexibility and effectiveness.

Opportunities In Oman market, some of the opportunities include…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Please contact our team to receive guidance on this assessment in full

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