Land Rover – Case Study

Presentation
Consumer Behavior - Group Number – 2
Alok Shukla, Dharmesh Gandhi, Saurabh Jain, Narendran Subbaiah, Adarsh Natarajan,
Ramanathan G A
Land Rover Positioning – Historical
Positioning - UK

 Land Rover – Functional Value Product

 Range Rover – Emotional Value Product
 Lifestyle Brand (Hedonic Concept)
 JND concept applied for incrementally increasing the price of Range Rover
 PR activities targeted towards effective use of reference groups and opinion
leaders
Initial Positioning in US
 Range Rover
 Perception Aspects
 Had to develop category membership and provide point of parity
 Point of Parity
 Four Wheel Drive
 Ruggedness, Safety
 Pricing
 Price dissonance was reduced by educating the customer of its culture and heritage
 Point of Difference
 4WD with Performance Luxury of a Car
 Positioned as Luxury Brand with British Heritage
 Perception Organization
 Self Selection using the pricing info in Ads
 Figure & Ground (Advertisements – Vehicles with muddy ground)
 Use of concept of closure through its ads
 Perception Selection - Problematic going by the low Ad Recall and Brand Awareness numbers (Exhibit
– 10)
 Perception of exclusivity created due to few distributors.
LRNA Stable – Applied Concepts
 Market Segmentation
 With the 4 X 4 leisure segment, made target users based appeal
 LR Discovery with Dual Positioning
 For Young, affluent adults, provided Visible Statements, 3 Doors car
 For conservative, smart buyers – Functional values, 7 doors car
 Umbrella Positioning
 Moved over from a single offering to multiple products under a single brand
 Discovery
 Range Rover
 Defender 90
Land Rover Discovery – Some Perceptual
Findings

 Discovery is in the same segment as Ford Explorer and Grand Cherokee,

however it appeals more to highly educated buyers.
 Discovery is also the brand brought predominantly by the affluent class.
Land Rover Discovery - Pricing Dissonance?
 Is the price of the car in the segment too
high ?
 More important as the target is to sell
40000 cars in an year
 Is price dissonance a bottleneck for LR
Discovery sales volume growth ?
 Customer don’t find positive acquisition
utility.
Land Rover– Key Recommendations
 Product Positioning
 To reduce price dissonance, new messages should be constructed to enforce premium positioning
 Need to enforce family based advertisements more strongly by using the concept of chunking/grouping.
 Transaction Utility concept
 The “Transaction Utility’ could be played up to ensure that customers felt good about their decision to
purchase the LR. This could be used by following retailing strategy.

 Allocating funds for Marketing Mix elements

 Increase budgetary allocation to fund image building activities for the parent brand
 To increase Ad Recall and Brand recollection and also to educate the customer on brand-premiumness, PR
activities needs to be increased.
 The relevant concepts are increase in sensory inputs using Weber's law.
 Print Advertisement should focus on reinforcing aesthetics and comfort features where there is a perceptual deficit
for LR Discovery vis a vis Ford Explorer/ Grand Cherokee

 Experiential marketing program should be aggressively pursued

 Invest in Love of Product Seminars to increase ownership
 Invest more in Driving Academy – Can be used to drive perceptions for performance facets

 Retailing Strategy
 Continue with centers -make shopping of vehicles a high involvement activity.
 These centers would help in increasing the association with in brands and people and help in shifting the reference
prices.