SMC X MakeShip
Overview
The Smith Marketing Consulting team working on this project was led by Catherine O’Brien and project consultants included: Omar Baboolal, Jovan Gill and Nicole Stevens. On June 2nd project lead Catherine O’Brien and incumbent Co-Chair Garrett Mitchell met with the client’s CEO and co-founder Rakan Al-Shawaf to discuss the project’s purview and scope. It was decided that the underlying purpose of this project was to propose new avenues for growth that MakeShip could potentially pursue. Throughout the duration of the project the team considered new growth avenues such as: TikTok marketing, email marketing, partnerships with artists, partnerships with e-sports & video game streamers via the Twitch platform, and Youtube advertisements. The team began the project on June 3rd, completed the report outlining our recommendations on July 6th, and completed the project’s executive summary on July 21st 2020.
The Problem
The key problem that our team at SMC was tasked with solving was to explore and evaluate new avenues that MakeShip could pursue in order to sustain growth in their brand. Prior to our project, MakeShip has primarily been using YouTube as their main platform. All of their creators are YouTubers, therefore all sales are reliant on a single platform. The only product that was being offered was their signature rotational line of plushies, at a price of $24.99.
The narrow scope of their offerings limited their potential for growth, and ability to reach a larger audience. This poses a problem for future growth as high sales from a broader audience base would be difficult to achieve. In terms of competition, many influencers are utilizing their platforms and using a direct to consumer method by creating their own platform or partnering with other existing companies. Their narrow scope combined with high levels of competition from many other retailers, lead to the proposal of a diversification-based strategy which raises MakeShip’s ceiling and provides them with more opportunities for success.
The Solution
Solving the problem MakeShip presented to us called for team members to dig deep into their imagination, this project was based on building multiple strategies to meet the company’s overall goals. We needed to think of viable ways to improve the company’s current email marketing initiative, break into the world of TikTok, and expand the reach of their product offering. Our team met for initial meetings and set up a foundation for each of the 3 strategies we were to be focusing on. Once we all had a solid grasp on them and the relative information we were going to suggest to MakeShip, we allocated one strategy per consultant and the director created a marketing plan framework that the team would follow. The additional research for each strategy was delegated to the consultant responsible and the team met as a group once a week to regroup and set new deadlines. The team worked through the framework and created all of the content necessary to complete the marketing plan.
Each consultant was assigned responsibility over one strategy and one additional component of the marketing plan, following the completion of writing the content for the strategy. The director was responsible for creating the marketing plan framework, completing multiple components of said plan, and designing the finished report in Adobe InDesign (following SMC branding).
At the close of this project, our team offered MakeShip a full fledged Marketing Plan that defined their vision & mission, a customer persona, 3 strategic solutions, the content necessary to roll out said solutions, a financial analysis, and more supporting information.
Highlights
Things we learned…
The Industry
When working with a company that sells plush toys, we quickly learned that there are many opportunities to pursue different avenues; whether it be musicians, gamers, or social media influencers. However, you can’t please everyone, so we tried to narrow our scope to focus on what we believed would be the most profitable industries for MakeShip to pursue.
The Nature of the Company
The nature of MakeShip is unique from traditional crowdfunding platforms; they design, manufacture, test, and ship all of their own products. Their approach for campaigns is extremely data-centric to ensure that each creator launches a successful campaign.
Competition
Something we quickly discovered was that the industry for plush toys is extremely competitive. With so many big influencers creating their own plush toys and selling them through their websites, we had to be realistic about what creators we wanted to target and who would be willing to work with MakeShip.
Marketing Strategies
We decided to focus on two key marketing strategies; TikTok marketing and email marketing. We discovered that TikTok can be used for marketing in four different ways: creating original content, partnering with influencers, being paid to advertise, and hashtag challenges. We also discovered that email marketing can be used in three different ways: newsletters, benefits (discounts, promotions, etc), and new releases & product updates
Did we develop any other skills as a team?
Although MakeShip did not require our team to apply technical skills (i.e., website developing, photoshop, coding, etc), we learned how to properly formulate a marketing strategy report.
How this experience will allow your team to grow?
Throughout this experience, our team members have developed strong bonds with one other. This has enabled us to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses as individuals, which will propel our team to achieve success moving forward.
What surprised us?
We were quite surprised by MakeShips sizeable email list; we wanted to take advantage of it to develop strong customer loyalty, as well as acquire new customers. We were also both surprised and intrigued that Makeship wanted to explore marketing strategies using TikTok, since very few companies have yet to take advantage of this rapidly growing social media platform.
Keys to Success
Create the framework and stick to it
Set mission/overall goal of your project before anything else (so everyone’s head is in the right place from the start)
Make meetings an open environment and ask questions to every team member
Be available for one on one communication between each other