Our talented team know how to excite, inspire and engage. With backgrounds in events, entertainment and travel, we’re full of ideas for amazing prizes and unforgettable incentives!
At Fulcrum, we all come to work every day because we have a shared love of travel and delivering once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Our team meetings are buzzing with fresh ideas, brand new experiences and glowing feedback from our travellers. We know what makes a great incentive, we have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the best experiences around the world, and we have an ever-expanding ‘little black book’ of the most exclusive suppliers in the business.
In addition to our creative ideas and experience, we know that our clients value our expertise and dedication to solving problems rather than creating them. Prizes and incentives are our world, but we understand that our clients have other priorities, so we make sure we’re delivering our ideas on-time, on-budget and on-brand. We thrive on tight deadlines, logistical challenges and creating perfectly tailored solutions, without the headaches!
About us
Perfect solutions every time
As a leading marketing Agency, we’re immensely proud to work with brands and agencies across a huge range of sectors and industries, giving us an unrivalled breadth of experience.
we have created and fulfilled prizes for promotions and activations across the world.
Our aim: help our clients achieve their goals through our experience and expertise, taking the stress and hassle out of prize fulfilment.
We work for both direct brands and agencies, often in collaboration or with other specialist agencies and partners. Many of our clients have existing assets – from festival tickets to sports hospitality – which we help them to build into the best possible prize packages. Others want to create unique, eye-catching marketing and btl content around their prize winners. We can deal with winners from any country and in any language; we can provide a full btl management service; we can even source camera crews for content capture.
Whatever your brief, we’ve got it covered.
SALES INCENTIVES
Driving sales and performance through tailored, flexible incentive programmes
With pressure always on to drive sales and performance, sales incentives are an essential part of rewarding achievement within many companies. From internal staff reward programmes to dealer and channel incentives, there’s no better way to create a happy, engaged and motivated workforce.
Our main goal is to understand your people and what makes them tick. From hundreds in a call centre team to a small on ground sales team, a clear overview of your audience is the most important part of the process. By taking a best approach, offering maximum choice and flexibility, we create incentives which are targeted, effective and tailored to your team.
Whether it’s sales rewards, dealer incentives or channel incentives, drop us a line; we’d love to help you drive sales with our fresh and creative approach to prizes and incentives. From once-in-a-lifetime holidays to mini-breaks, high-street vouchers and designer goods, you can rest assured that with Fulcrum you’re in safe hands.
24 hour turnaround for urgent briefs
Topline ideas within 2 hours if needed
Competitive fixed quotes with no hidden costs
Expert Winner Management and Fulfilment
Retail Marketing Strategy | engagement marketing Solutions Erandwana
Managing the Consumer Offering
6.5 Managing the Offering
Learning Objectives
- Understand the people involved in creating and managing offerings.
- Recognize the differences in organizing product marketing for consumer versus B2B companies.
Managing all of a company’s offerings presents a number of challenges. Depending on the size of the company and the breadth of the company’s offerings, several positions may be needed.
A brand manager is one such position. A brand manager is the person responsible for all business decisions regarding offerings within one brand. By business decisions, we mean making decisions that affect profit and loss, which include such decisions as which offerings to include in the brand, how to position the brand in the market, pricing options, and so forth. Indeed, a brand manager is often charged with running the brand as if it were its own separate business.
A brand manager is much more likely to be found in consumer marketing companies. Typically, B2B companies do not have multiple brands so the position is not common in the B2B environment. What you often find in a B2B company is a product manager, someone with business responsibility for a particular product or product line. Like the brand manager, the product manager must make many business decisions, such as which offerings to include, advertising selection, and so on. Companies with brand managers include Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Kraft, Target, General Mills, and ConAgra Foods. Product managers are found at Xerox, IBM, Konica-Minolta Business Solutions, Rockwell International, and many others.
The University of Georgia was the first to launch a graduate program in brand management, but the only major program now being taught in the United States is at the University of Wisconsin. The program is managed through the university’s Center for Brand and Product Management. Most brand managers simply have an undergraduate degree in marketing, but it helps to have a strong background in either finance or accounting because of the profitability and volume decisions brand managers have to make. In the United Kingdom, a number of school have undergraduate degree programs specializing in brand management, as does Seneca College in Toronto, Canada.
In some companies, a category manager has responsibility for business decisions within a broad grouping of offerings. For example, a category manager at SC Johnson may have all home cleaning products, which would mean that brands such as Pledge, Vanish, Drano, Fantastik, Windex, Scrubbing Bubbles, and Shout would be that person’s responsibility. Each of those brands may be managed by brand manager who then reports directly to the category manager.
At the retail level, a category manager at each store is responsible for more than just one manufacturer’s products. The home cleaning category manager would have responsibility for offerings from SC Johnson, as well as Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and many other producers.
Another option is to create a market manager, who is responsible for business decisions within a market. In this case, a market can be defined as a geographic market or region; a market segment, such as a type of business; or a channel of distribution. For example, SC Johnson could have regional insect control managers. Regional market managers would make sense for insect control because weather has an influence on which bugs are pests at any given time. For example, a southern regional manager would want more inventory of the repellent Off! in March because it is already warm and the mosquitoes are already breeding and biting in the southern United States.
In B2B markets, a market manager is more likely to be given responsibility for a particular market segment, such as all hospital health care professionals or doctor’s offices. All customers such as these (retail, wholesale, and so forth) in a particular industry compose what’s called a vertical market, and the managers of these markets are called vertical market managers. B2B companies organize in this way because
- buying needs and processes are likely to be similar within an industry,
- channels of communication are likely to be the same within an industry but different across industries.
Because magazines, Web sites, and trade shows are organized to serve specific industries or even specific positions within industries, B2B marketers find vertical market structures for marketing departments to be more efficient than organizing by geography.
Market managers sometimes report to brand managers or are a part of their firms’ sales organizations and report to sales executives. Market managers are less likely to have as much flexibility in terms of pricing and product decisions and have no control over the communication content of marketing campaigns or marketing strategies. These managers are more likely to be tasked with implementing a product or brand manager’s strategy and be responsible for their markets. Some companies have market managers but no brand managers. Instead, marketing vice presidents or other executives are responsible for the brands.
Key Takeaway
Brand managers decide what products are to be marketed and how. Other important positions include category managers, market managers, and vertical market managers. Category managers are found in consumer markets, usually in retail. Market managers can be found in both consumer markets and B2B markets. However, vertical market managers are found only in B2B markets. Some companies have market managers but no brand managers. Instead, a vice president of marketing or other executive is responsible for the brands.
Review Questions
- What is a brand manager?
- How do brand managers differ from category managers?
- What is a market manager?
- Which type of manager has the most marketing responsibility?
