Overall, a big picture of the situation in Gould Inc. in my point of view is about “We have a gorgeous technology. It will sell itself somehow”. Without a clear vision about the market and the customers, Gould was planning to sell their product with a very optimistic expectation but vague strategies. They decided to push the printer into the market because they have an excellent technology of printing. Their goals for the whole company focused on technologies, not customers. This led them to unclear objectives of the product. They wanted to enter and be familiar with peripheral market and have the leader position, meaning that they want a large market share. Also, they expect a very high profit growth (15% in earning per share) and wanted the same growth in the long run. Well, these are good objectives, to get market share and a lot of profit. However, they missed to study enough about the market, customers’ needs, and competitors. Hence, it is difficult to justify that their objectives are feasible. The fact that they cared about technologies more than about customers could lead them to the failure to meet these imaginary objectives.
The segmentation of customers by application that they studied makes sense to me. The customers’ different application would lead to different expectation of the product which will help Gould penetrate each market more easily. However, they addressed too many markets and some of them were not possible for Gould such as CRT Microfilm and Plotter for scientific users. For competitor targets, they failed to clearly address who the competitors were, what position Gould should aim for, and what value Gould should propose to customers in order to be the ultimate choice for them.
Their initial marketing plan was set up on very little knowl ...