Gillette Case

In the case, Ralph Bingham, vice president -new business development for Gillette is the protagonist. Bingham, who is a part of the Gillette Safety Razor Division SRD, was responsible for earnings growth target as part of the corporate long range planning process. Bingham's job was to identify new business opportunities with high growth for the division, to assess their feasibility, and working with functional managers in SRD--to develop plans for entering such markets. Bingham had to think outside the box to reach the company's aggressive sales growth figures as he was limited by the growth opportunities of the existing products.

Since the split off of the toiletries business from the razor and blade business, SRD was seeking new growth opportunities; to diversify outside its blade and razor business. Having that in mind, Bingham did not hesitate to venture outside of shaving products and come up with marketing strategy decisions for new products/businesses. He had to work on deciding which product to provide, where to place his product, what price it would be sold at, and how much promotion would be necessary to insure the success of the new product. This being said, Bingham began to brainstorm the possibilities available that would require as little capital as possible to begin production.

For being efficient and cost effective as possible, Bingham sought to build on SRD's strengths, which were: shaving technology and development; high volume manufacturing of precision metal and plastic products; and the marketing of mass-distributed packaged goods. Based on the above strengths, the options available in terms of product were blank cassette tapes due to the company's ability to manufacture high volumes of plastic products. Having relationships with many forms of retail outlets, the placement options were many, simple to access, and well diversified. With promotion being the SRD's specialty, coming up with an effective promotional mix would not be an issue. The SRD was very familiar with the media advertising and has established ties with many media outlets through their past experiences with sport event sponsorships, prime time movie slots, and network series, to name a few.

Having read about the emerging blank audio cassette market, Bingham did some self-research and began to visit some of the retail outlets in which Gillette blades and razors have been sold at. Through his self-research, he observed several factors that he believed were opportunities that the SRD could take advantage of. Some of these factors were that in his judgment, the packaging and display of such cassettes was rather weak, and no single brand appeared to have obtained wide distribution. Also, the lack of television advertising led Bingham to think that the companies own brand would be able to become a leader in the industry by establishing a significant television advertising presence.

In order to back up his assumptions