Samenvatting

This plan is written because the company Napco beds has taken over the brand Norma approximately one year ago after the brand declared bankruptcy. Napco beds is a company that owns different brands named Napco, Nextday and Norma respectively. The client for this plan is Norma. In 1884 Norma started with the slogan ‘your sleep, our work’. This is the slogan that Norma still uses these days.
The urgency of this plan is that Norma does not know the profile of their customers. Norma has a lot of knowledge about the different dealers but it does not know who that final customer is. The objective of this plan is to investigate how Norma could improve its strategies in compliance with the wishes of consumers engaged in the purchasing process of a bed.
Research has been conducted on the internal- and external environment Norma resides in. This research consists of information about the Norma brand, its products, the competitors as well as the market environment.
The results of the internal research show that everyone aged between 41 and 60 who is searching for a bed sectioned in the middle (between the €1500,- and €3500,-) could be a customer of Norma. However, Norma has not been able to sort out a positioning for the brand to make it unique.
The customers are concluding that the price (62.83%) and the quality of the bed (56.13%) are most important to them. A close call is the advice of the salesperson, 56.13% thinks good advice is one of the most important things during the purchase process.
The results of the external research show that the furniture industry can be described as small, only 1.28% of the whole market in the Netherlands consists of companies that sell furniture. This particular market depends on a good economy and a thriving housing market. The more sales of houses the more demand there is for furniture. All those moves provide an impulse of furniture sales. So if those two are positive, the furniture industry will grow. If not, some of companies will not survive. At the moment the economy is growing which means that the furniture industry is also growing. In the year 2015 the market has grown with 11% and in 2016 the expectation is a growth of another 6%.
Research shows that the internet is a big player in making a business a success. In total 76% of the consumers do research on a bed online before they go to a physical store to buy one. And in the store the consumer does not just want to buy the bed they need, in addition they want an experience while buying it.
A conclusion we can make, is that customers do not know which brand they want to buy before they conduct research. In contrast to when the customer is in its purchasing process, than quantitative research shows that the brand is very important.
Norma has three important competitors, those are Auping, Swiss Sense and Pullman. Auping and Swiss Sense are two strong brands with a lot of stores and customers. Both brands have physical shops and an online web shop for accessories, which they also sell in the stores.
The most important confrontations were elaborated into an implementation plan. Those confrontations were:
Norma is not visible on the internet;
three-quarter of the customers conducts research online before they buy;
the growing online market in combination with the fact that customers can`t find Norma online.
Another important thing is to create an experience for the customer.
The implementation advises Norma to change the website in a way such that the customer can find it when they are in there first phase of conducting research on buying a new bed. The implementation also advises Norma to start with channel-marketing as this market has grown with 25% last year. The last point is to create a unique experience in the stores.