Oakley's Internal Analysis Essay

5. Oakley’s internal Analysis

In this section, it is going to be done a detailed internal analysis of the company through different marketing tools which would allow to understand the strategy that Oakley is following as well as to obtain some conclusions of how the company does to be a leader in the sports performance sector.

5.1 Marketing mix

The Marketing mix or also called 4P’s is useful tool and a basic element of the marketing departments that allows to define the marketing strategy of a company or a brand from four different points: product, place, price and promotion. It is essential that there is a hundred per cent coherence and consistency between these variable so that they can complement each other and get better results. Next,

each of the elements it is going to be analysed so that we can get a whole picture of the marketing strategy of Oakley.

• Price
Regarding price it is important to highlight the fact that Oakley is a brand that follows a high pricing strategy. The strategy of Oakley is to bring the brand reputation to a superior level and by introducing high prices they can segment the market by focusing on the customers with higher incomes. When comparing Oakley's prices with its competitors ones, it can be observed that Oakley's prices are one of the highest, for instance let’s compare the price of some sport performance sunglasses such as the cycling ones. In order to do this ranking, it has been taken into consideration a range of average prices of top performance eyewear specifically for cycling.

Brand Average price range
Oakley 170-260€
Rudy Project 140-250€
Adidas 110-190€
Nike 100-190€
Spiuk 50-130€
Uvex 40-116€

• Product
Product is the key factor of this success due to the fact that Oakley only produces, distributes and sells top high quality products with the best and most innovative technology in the market. Innovation has been a core value in the company’s philosophy since its origins and for this reason Oakley has been able to lead some of the most significant changes in this industry such as the introduction of new materials, new designs or new lenses.
The range of products of Oakley is wide and diverse, to start with let’s focus on the sunglasses, within this range of products the brand splits the collection into two main groups, which are performance and lifestyle sunglasses. Following up with eyewear, Oakley also sells goggles, which can also be broadly divided into two groups, snow and motocross. Moving towards apparel, the brand focuses the activity on boardshorts, shirts, tees, tanks, sweaters, hoodies, jackets pants and shorts, within apparel Oakley also produces lifestyle products as well as performance ones such as specific surfing boardshorts. The next group of products contains accessories and it includes from bags and bagpacks to gloves, hats, beanies, belts or socks. These are the main groups of products of Oakley, so the ones in which the company focuses on more the strategy and the ones that represent a highest percentage of sales, but the brand also owns lines of footwear and watches.
Furthermore, the brand allows their clients to customize their eyewear through its website in order to provide a complete satisfactory service. It is also important to mention that all Oakley’s products have a warranty, for instance eyewear has a two-year warranty as well as watches. To sum up with, it is important to highlight the fact that the feature that defines and differentiates Oakley’s products is the high-quality that leads them to a superior level and which allow professional and amateur athletes to practice their sports to the maximum level of performance.

• Place
Place, or also called distribution, plays an important role on this company because where a company sells its products affects they way how customers perceive the brand.

Oakley distributes its products only in specialized stores, what represents an added value for its products. A part from selling eyewear in the optical channel, because it is a market that should not be omitted, Oakley mainly focuses its strategy on core stores where the real grassroots athletes buy their products. By doing this, the brand is perceived as a core brand due to two reasons, the first one is that customers see where real professional and amateur extreme sports athletes buy Oakley’s products, and the second reason is that if they want to buy Oakley products, they need to go to specific stores so that an extra motivation to buy those items is added. Furthermore, Oakley owns some stores inside some of the biggest retailers of Spain such as El Corte Inglés. From a geographical perspective, Oakley sells its products throughout the whole country but focusing on the areas where there is more concentration of people as well as strategic points such as near to ski stations or surfing spots. Place, also includes how the Oakley’s products are distributed inside the stores, in this case the brand always tries to find the best points where the brand is highlighted and easier to find, moreover they add trade marketing tools such as windows, banners and panels to attract the potential customers to the Oakley’s

corners. The network distribution of Oakley in Spain is wide and a clear example is that only in the area of Barcelona there are more than 50 places where Oakley products can be bought.
Annex foto

• Promotion
Regarding promotion, it includes the activities that involve communicating with clients and it is one of the most important sections due to the fact that it must fortify the brand identity, should represent an increase in sales and should serve as a brand positioning tool among others. The Oakley’s goals of their promotion strategy are; building brand awareness, which consists on making people aware of what Oakley is and which kind of products do they sell; increasing the interest on the brand; providing information of the new products that firm is launching as well as the events and activities promoted by the company; and differentiating Oakley’s products.
Oakley is a brand that focuses a lot on promotion activities; to start with we are going to focus on the online activities.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the basic branding tools used to engage the community, through these three tools the company is able to initiate campaigns via hashtags which turn into thousands of interactions between customers and the company, for instance clear examples are #oneobsession and #liveyours campaigns. Furthermore, Oakley’s social networks accounts have also thousands of followers worldwide, the company has different accounts depending on the sport in order to be more specific towards its

followers.
In addition, Oakley prepares local events that vary depending on the area. In Spain, those events are mainly focused on surfing and snowboarding, the aim of these events is to create an Oakley atmosphere that turns into an increase of sales, while creating brand awareness and promoting local athletes. The point of promoting local athletes is really important because the rest of surfers, snowboarders or skaters in this case, see someone who is really close to them wearing and using Oakley products. Furthermore, there is another complementary initiative implemented by Oakley which brings a big impact that is giving some samples of products to bloggers or instagramers who have a lot of repercussion on the social networks due to the fact that their posts can positively affect the brand reputation and the costumer’s behaviour towards the brand.