¶ … HP Envy Spectre 14 is an Ultrabook manufactured by HP and a launched into various markets worldwide in February 2012. HP unveiled this series and appropriately billed it as a "premium Ultrabook." The computer is indeed premium since its starting price of $1,400 made it pricier than the much hyped about 13-inch MacBook Air (Wollman,2012).Some of its remarkable features include a standard 14-inch (1600 x 900 Radiance Display) as well as a CPU powered by an Core i5-2467M or Core i7 processes, 4GB RAM, a 9-hr battery, a backlit keyboard as well as an incredibly beautiful carrying case.
The Ultrabook has several other bells and whistles such as an NFC chip that is built into its palm rest to be used for transferring Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) from one's phone browser to the machine. It also features an Intel Wireless Display, Beats Audio Speakers, HP Wireless Audio, CoolSense technology, and full copies of registered proprietary software like Photoshop, Premiere Elements as well as a 2-Year subscription of Norton Internet Security. It also has upgrade options of an additional 4GB RAM as well as 256GB SSD. These features are obviously better than the ones found in competing products under the Ultrabook category. It is worth defining or rather elaborating on this new concept of "Ultrabooks."
What is an Ultrabook?
An Ultrabook is noted by O'Brien (2011) as a higher-end form of subnotebook as defined by Intel. The company has applied to register this name as a trademark (USPTO,2011).The Ultrabooks are specially designed to feature a reduced weight and size with a very expended battery life that does not compromise performance. They run on low-power Intel processes fitted with integrated graphics, a unibody chassis for fitting larger battery cases as well as solid state drives for increased responsiveness (Emmet,2011). Due to their relatively thin profile, they have a limitation to the number of external ports such as the USB ports (Milian,2012).
The aim and objective of the marketing plan
Aim
The aim of this marketing plan is to evaluate the internal and external environment of HP in order to come up with the best strategy for marketing and positioning HP Ultrabook Spectre 14 as a premium Ultrabook with the best features in the relatively young "Ultrabook" market segment.
Objective
The objectives of this marketing plan are:
1. To make HP Ultrabook Spectre 14 to be the best selling Ultrabook in world.
2. To make the sales of HP Ultrabook Spectre 14 exceed $30 million by the end of the 1st quarter.
HP Ultrabook Spectre 14's SWOT Analysis
SWOT is a special acronym used in the formulation of organizational strategy. The acronym stands for the internal Strengths and Weaknesses of a given firm or product as well as the Opportunities and Threats that exists within the external environment. The SWOT analysis technique is based on the assumption that any effective strategy is derived from a perfect "fit" between an organization's internal resources (the strengths and weaknesses) as well as situations in the external environment (opportunities and threats). A perfect fit maximizes the business' strengths and opportunities while effectively minimizing the weaknesses and threats. This a simple assumption if applied accurately leads to very powerful implications in the design of a successful business strategy. Through the relation of the strengths as well as weaknesses of a given marketing information system with the potential opportunities and threats within the environment where it is supposed to be implemented, an organization's management can weigh their impact on the organizational operations and then formulate a strategy by the application of the internal strengths as well as the external opportunities so as t reinforce the base of their strategy. The organization can also eliminate the threats and weaknesses (Grant,2005).
Strengths and Weaknesses being internal aspects of a given organization are noted by Kotler (1988) to cover the four key areas of marketing, manufacturing, financials and organizational.
SWOT analysis as a tool for gaining competitive advantage
A SWOT analysis can be used by HP in the identification of the competitive advantage that can be gained in positioning its product (HP Ultrabook Spectre 14) in acertain way. Competitive advantage is a concept that is very popular in the modern management literature. Schendel (1994,p.1) noted that when Edmund Learned and Kenneth Andrews were describing SWOT analysis, the indicated that strength is a competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is defined as the ability of a given organization to perform in a single or multiple ways a task that its competitors find to be very difficult to ape at a particular moment, be it now or in the future (Kotler,2000;Kotler,1997,p.53).
Competitive advantage is therefore noted by Kotler as a strategic goal. This is because excellent performance is correlated with the achievement of a competitive advantage as noted by Read and Difillipi (1990,p.90).Competitive advantage can also be seen as the ability of accompany such as HP to produce products and services that are different from what their competitors do through the application of their strengths in order to add value...
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