Terra chips

TERRA CHIPS, a USA-based company, founded in 1990, offers a wide range of vegetable and potato chips, which have created a new niche on the salty snack market. Terra has always had a tradition of creating masterful combination's of unique vegetables with a variety of fabulous flavors. So we are going to deal with this business case, in order to make you more familiar with this company. First, to define the framework in which the company is evolving, a SWOT analysis has to be carried out. Indeed, that will helps us find the internal variables of the company (its strengths and weaknesses), that is to say those under the control of the firm and the external variables (opportunities and threats) that the company has to face. The snack market as a whole is growing at some 5% a year. Certain sectors, such as meat snacks, yogurt and sugar – free candy, are experiencing much faster growth, while many of the most established product sector are seeing much more modest growth. There is an evolution concerning snacks: before they used to be only salty snacks, but today we can notice that specialty snacks, bakery snacks or sweet snacks appear. The healthy trend is certainly not the only trend in packaged snack foods, but it is by far the most important and widespread one, driven in large part by a heavy national focus on children’s health. Although sales of packaged snack foods in the U.S. topped $61 billion in 2005, this is up only 6% over 2001 sales, since good returns from "healthy" categories like yogurt and fresh fruit have been mostly offset by losses in "less healthy" categories like candy and cookies.

[...] Positioning away from a competitor (Positioned away from a competitor) By creating a new product category, with vegetable chips, Terra Chips differentiates its products totally from the products of its competitors, who produce in the salty snack market copy-cat goods. Moreover, Terra Chips positions itself by its brand image, well appreciated for example for the high quality of its products as can prove us the ratio quality/price. As a result, Terra Chips would go away from the trend of salty snack products which would be in period of maturity (according to the diagram Product Life Cycle”). [...]

[...] Image of exclusivity: Terra chips is perceived as a cosmopolitan product: it’s for DINKs (Double Income No Kids) or YUPPIES (Young Urban Professionals). Those categories of persons don’t mind paying a high price to get a product that will show they are trendy and that will give them a good image to their peer group. VII) The buyer perception of high quality purchase The question which has to be asked is the following one: What is a high quality purchase? [...]

[...] Some people discover Terra Chips products by chance, for example they knew them from their colleagues who consume them at work, or from their professor, friends, during a road tripping, Some individuals are even brand switching, in the way that they change their minds concerning others products. By changing the lifestyles of the individuals, those ones don’t want to taste anything else and as a consequence, we could talk of a Terra Chips community. People, indeed, meet themselves in a Terra Chips group, they enjoy a high degree of satisfaction. [...]