Advertising Plan

Succeeding without TV, Radio, or Newspapers
Our corporation, Negative Weight Solutions, is a company that creates low-fat, healthy, and delicious culinary alternatives and then sells them to restaurants in the market for healthy food. We decided to form a health food company due to a shared concern in interest in healthy eating among the board members. However, we realized that supermarkets are already pretty choked with health food from a billion different brands. We did not wish to try our luck by throwing more money into the veritable constellation of competitors that make up this very saturated market. Instead, we decided that rather than create an entire line of healthy food and market it to grocers, we’d create recipes and market them to restaurants. Additionally, once we were established, we could begin operating on commission, extending our efforts to creating McDonald’s next Fruit and Walnut Salad, or whatever came our way.
Among the corporations making up the class, Negative Weight Solutions is rare, perhaps unique, in offering services to the business community rather than the consumer market. Due to this unusual arrangement, Negative Weight Solutions has additional concerns and restrictions to consider. For one thing, our board has unanimously decided that most marketing channels would be ineffective at moving our products. We reached this conclusion on the assumption that restaurants do not purchase recipes in the same way that consumers buy groceries. There’s a greater investment on the part of the restaurant, for if a consumer doesn’t like the brand of ricotta cheese they bought one week, they can change their decision and suffer only minor consequences. If a major restaurant buys a recipe and it doesn’t fly, then the restaurant is probably out several hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising alone. Given their circumstances, most restaurants simply can’t afford to purchase anything based on television, newspaper, or radio advertisement.
With this in mind, Negative Weight Solutions determined that the best way to sell our products was to make direct with our customers, putting a focus on trade shows. Using the trade show as a springboard, we could talk directly with buyers and management, offer samples, network, and negotiate. A secondary focus would be querying these companies with our products directly. Our reasoning is that once a company realizes the large demand for healthy food and our expertise at creating it, they’ll be happy to do business with us, to the enrichment of both parties. We would also, of course, have a presence in trade magazines.