FREE ESSAY ON PAPER PRODUCTS CORPORATION MARKETING

PAPER PRODUCTS CORPORATION MARKETING

Mary Miller is the marketing manager for Paper Products Corporation and she has to decide
whether she should allow her largest customer to buy some of Paper Products' file folders
and market them under their own name, (Natcom Inc.) rather than the File X's brand, used
by Paper Products. Mary is afraid that if she doesn't accept the offer, the customer will
find another file folder producer. Mary really only has two options; accept or refuse the
offer from Natcom. There is a certain degree of risk involved with either option and she
needs to decide which option is the safest for Paper Products Corporation. If Paper
Products refuses the offer they are putting themselves in a position to possibly lose 30
percent of their business, approximately 12 million dollars per year. Even if Natcom
continued purchasing their other supplies from Paper Products, and only quit purchasing
file folders, the business would lose approximately 4.2 million dollars per year. If Mary
decided to take the offer from Natcom, and allow them to sell Paper Products' file
folders with their name, she would be going against company policy and it would not be
easy to change this policy. It would be very easy for Paper Products to Accommodate
Natcom's offer because they have excess capacity. If they turn down the business, Natcom
could go to another producer and cut into Paper Products' sales at Natcom stores. Another
benefit of this offer is that Paper Products would not have to spend any marketing
dollars to acquire this new business. Natcom came to them with this offer and it did not
cost Mary Miller, or Paper Products anything. According to the marketing concept, Mary
should accept the offer from Natcom. As marketing 
Chris Phillips
293-78-3538
04/28/2000
manager, Mary should identify what the customer needs, and make Paper Products Inc. the
best company at satisfying those needs for a profit. In this case the customer is Natcom
and they obviously need to market a line of file folders with their name attached. This
need should be clear to Mary because her customer has now approached her three times with
this request. Mary will need her expert marketing skills when she tries to sell this idea
to Bob Butcher, Paper Products president. Mr. Butcher is primarily interested in the
development of new products but he will most likely be interested in this proposal since
it deals with his companies' biggest customer. There will have to be a policy change for
Paper Products Inc. concerning the corporate policy of refusing dealer-branding requests.
Paper Products implemented this policy because they wanted the success of their products
to depend on the quality rather than just a low price, but only 40 percent of their file
folder products are in a specialized line while the other 60percent are relatively
homogeneous shopping products. The success of the homogeneous file folders will be very
dependent on the price rather than the quality, therefore this policy depending on
quality rather than low price needs to be revised. Mary should also approach Mr. Butcher
about using some more of the company's available money for the promotion of their
existing brands. Paper Products needs to pull some of their money out of new-product
development and attempt to achieve some market penetration. Although60 percent of the
current market does sound appealing, they may be able to grab some of the remaining 40
percent with some good promotions and market penetration.