Chapter 4: The marketing environment.

A Hello Kitty room design

       Sanrio is a well known company in gift items or social communication gifts industry. Their products, either stationary, school supplies, clothing's, dolls, accessories, candy, electronics... not only just for shopping daily, they also can be gifts. Hello Kitty has been established for over 40 years and continuing to develop new products to retain and gain more customers.

      They target and focus on women and girls. Sanrio has the research and development team, marketing team, designers, strategic planners, and the list goes on.  The purpose of having these grouped functions is to help the company gain competitive advantage.  Integrating mechanisms improve the coordination between all of these functions in the form of the teams. Through the researches, they know what their customers wants. kids want candies and cute school tools, young girls want something that they can use like lip stick, mirror... Their course of action is to market their products to women as well as girls by extending its product line to include household appliances and accessories to the narrow product line. The real power of the company is brands and the images of their characters. Their products are unique but not so expensive. Where else you can find a pink toaster, vacuum or  Hello Kitty oil can? Giving a school bag as a gift to a girl is nice, but a Hello Kitty school bag is cool and nicer, big smile!

 Smart ForTwo vehicles that start at $1,700 for full wraps and $550 if you can contain your feline craving to just the two door panels. It's the latest entry by Hello Kitty in the adult product market. There are Hello Kitty wines, adult clothing and kitchen appliances. In fact, there may be a Hello Kitty everything.

 

        Corporate with others companies is another great idea of Sanrio. For example, McDonald’s has offered Sanrio-branded toys as promotion to sell their Happy Meals. By this, they get closer with their young customers who maybe when getting older still back and support their favorite brand, Hello Kitty. 

     4Kidds Entertainment, Hasbro, Mattel, Morning Glory whose own Pokemon, My Little Pony, Barbies and Mashimaro are the 4 main competitors of Sanrio. The threats are low but still keep the team of creators to keep up with the constant designing of new products and characters

     During the Asian recession, Sanrio was still extremely high profitable. With global expansion and subsidiaries in many countries, plus Hello Kitty is recognized world wide, all they have to do is obtaining cost reduction from driving down the experience curve to expand even further.