Product Concepts

All the products in the Essie line are tangible items. these items range from a range of fabulous nail colors, to many nails care kits. The products are both business products, which the salons and retail stores buy to either sell to customers or perform manicures and pedicures. The products are also used as consumer products, where the consumer will buy it for their own personal wants. The Essie company does not have a very large product mix width, meaning they do sell a lot of nail care products but not an extremely large amount, however, the products line depth is very large. Essie's line of nail polish colors currently include over 250 colors and grows larger with each mew season. Each bottle of polish is made of glass, and has the brand Essie on it so everyone will know what company made the amazing color. some say that the bottle is boring however i believe that the bottle is simple and classy, and is not to showy, therefore the consumer can just focus on the amazing color inside the bottle. as stated in a previous post, Essie does not change its packaging or brand name from country to country, the products are standardized. The only thing that the company changes with each country is the colors in their advertisements. Essie definitely has a high amount of brand equity. Many women in the target market range, and even those not have hear of the brand and are well aware of Essie's quality, and many consumers of Essie most often always use it.

Sales Promotion and Personal Selling

Although it is not very often that you will find an Essie coupon, or voucher for a free sample, on some occasions the company does surprise us by giving out dollar off coupons. Essie is sold at 8 dollars a bottle, however, if you are willing to go onto websites such as Ebay, and Amazon, you can find the products significantly cheaper. The reason Essie rarely has coupons is simply because the company is aware that consumers will still purchase the products. One main consumer of the Essie products are salons, if these salons do not have the latest Essie colors, many people will not go back so they must keep the seasonal colors in store. One free offer recently given out was the "one day without blues" polish, which is for the Tom's shoes and Essie polish one day without shoes campaign, ( for more details check out the one day without shoes page.) for this campaign Essie gave out 5,000 free bottles of this polish. 

 Essie has a facebook page at, facebook.com/essie where you can go on to see pictures, videos, all the colors, and who is wearing them! This is how Essie advertises all their new products, because we all know how popular facebook is! The page has over 384,982 likes, with 15,530 "people talking about this."

By "liking" the page Essie will send you exclusives on the latest lines, and which colors are in style!

Advertising and Public Relations

As we all know, advertising is a major part of every company. The way a company markets its products to the customers, will result in the amount of profit made. Essie polish spent an estimate of $150 million in advertising in 2011. Essie company has specific areas in which they advertise. Essie has a continuous media schedule with Seventeen Magazine, each week when a new magazine comes out Essie has one full page add featuring a product from their new line. While advertising, the adds are attempting to build a mood and image for its consumers. Each Essie add consists of a fabulous color dripping onto an object, highlighting the beauty of each color:  if you want your hands to be beautiful, you must buy the Essie polish. Along with the Magazine another common way Essie advertises their products in through Outdoor Media. Essie has images on billboards, mini billboards in malls, and on the top on taxis.

Essie keeps up with their consumers needs by creating seasonal line. continuing on, Essie keeps its companies names circulating with the concept of "name dropping". The company's names being mentioned by famous artists, in games shows, and more. one example is in 1983 when Joan Rivers announces that she is wearing Essie  Jelly Apple polish, or when in 1989 when Queen Elizabeth hair dresser sends Essie a request for her color Ballet Slippers, saying that is the only color Her Majesty would wear, that year the Ballet Slippers colors sold over 25,000 bottles in 2 months. The name dropping continues when "Essie" is the answer to a question on the game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

Essie uses its company website, Essie.com, for most of its advertising. on the website includes the new collection for that season, all colors ever created in Essie, Editorials, a timeline of the companies journey, nail care, where is find Essie products, and so much more. 

Essie uses advertising appeal to reach out to its consumers. It makes the consumers realize the gorgeous colors Essie has and makes them want to have them. 

Retailing

Although Essie is sold in thousands of salons, department stores, and pharmacy's there is no actual retail store for the products other then the companies website Essie.com. Because of this i decided to go into one of my favorite stores "J Crew", and see the different aspects of the retail store. Another reason i chose J crew is because Essie colors are very often sold in the J Crew retail stores, Essie's seasonal collections match with J Crews seasonal apparel, and to compliment both the outfit as well as the polish they are modeled together, and therefore sold in the same store.

 J Crew offers the highest quality women's and men's clothing as well as children's, including cashmere, sweaters, womens dresses and shoes, mens shirts and ties, accessories, and much more. J Crew is a chain store which means it is owned and operated as a group by a single organization. J Crew is known as more of a high end store and therefore offers a high level of service. A personal shopper is available upon request, of course at a costly price; and gift wrapping, delivery, consulting, are available as well as alterations on very special occasions. Seeing as J Crew considers itself a high end store, the prices tend to be a bit higher then the average store, how ever nothing near to designer store prices. When ever a new collection is brought in to the store the prices are always near the 100 mark line for a casual sweater. However, within the next 2 moths, the prices of those items drop significantly. Upon walking into the store i find them to have a very intelligent way of greeting the customers. The security guard or a different employee stands at the store and as a customer walks in says hello how are you. I find that to be refreshing because when going into certain stores, the moment you walk in their are 5 employees bombarding you asking you if you need help. that always turns me off, so i find the simple greeting of hello to be a refreshing change. J Crew defines themselves as having classy, elegant, sophisticated clothing. Their product offering are regular items in their collection which often include cashmere sweaters, button down shirts, suit pants and jackets for both males and females, ballet flats, pearl jewelry, and pencil skirts. For their promotion strategy when ever the company advertising, it is always men and women who look classy while remaining trendy. Clean cut, ironed clothing, subtle make up, and so forth,(unless it is a swim suit line).

J crew has thousands of proper locations across the world. The company is flexible and therefore are able to have stores in various places. either having their regular stores in the average mall, or turning themselves into a factory outlet store when placed in an outlet mall. 

The atmosphere of the store reflect the kinds of clothing placed into it. The store is neat and organized, never loud music playing, the racks are not over crowded, the accessories are often displayed in glass cases, and the store always smell clean and fresh.

J Crew has many, but not to many employees around to help you with your every need, leaving each customer satisfied, and ready to come back again.

     

Consumer Decision Making

A consumer who would chose to buy Essie as their brand of polish would generally be a women of class, sophisticated, looking for a fresh look, and cares about her appearance. The consumer has a want, she wants to show elegance and class and therefore wants to paint her nails a dashing color. The external stimulus of the Essie brand makes it very hard to resist, many women who want to look nice and elegant have painted nails, the fashion forward colors that Essie has in their collection line make Essie the number one brand of polish to buy.

 Once the consumer decides that she wants to have her nails painted, often a internal information search is then played out, in which the consumer thinks back to all the advertisements, and photos of celebrity's in Essie colors and then searches out to buy the product. Luckily, for Essie consumers there does not have to be much involvement. one the decision is made to buy, the polish is available on over 150 websites on the internet, and in thousands of salons and retail stores across the world. The decision to buy Essie is often made when the consumer has an important event coming up, perhaps a date, or if she knows sh is a girl who like to go out and loves looking stylish. Essie persuades their customers to buy their products by giving off the impression that they are a brand about other polishes, and that someone who wears the polish will look classy, chic, and sophisticated.