Principles of Marketing: Opening an Ice Cream Parlour

This study has been conducted in the pursuit of completing the `Principles of Marketing' course. The main purpose of this report is to investigate how a product can be produced and marketed within the budgetary confines of a quarter of a million rupees. The idea was to test our ability to apply the marketing concepts and techniques learned in class. It added a touch of practicality to the course.

Before we begin, we would like to take a moment to thank Mr. Dawson for all his help toward the completion of this report, both within and outside the classroom.

We have chosen to enter the retail business, opening a specialty ice cream parlor called `Sugar'. We have elected to sell imported diet ice cream which has no sugar, no fat, no cholesterol, at our outlet which is to be located in Clifton, next to Pizza Hut. Our consumers fall into three segments of our target market. The primary consumers are young, fashionable, health conscious women. Our Secondary markets involve people who visit slimming clinics and are often on a diet, and people who are diabetics or have cholesterol/weight related health problems.

Our target market comprises essentially upper middle and upper lower income groups.

This report illustrates the various aspects of conducting a business that combined to give us the rare pan-pleasure experience of trying our imaginations, and coming to grips with reality.

```Our Trade Character-How we didn't choose it

Initially, we though that a trade character would be a good idea. It is not very common for Pakistani organizations, specially ice cream parlors, to have a trade character so it could serve as an added feature of differential advantage for one product.

We considered a few alternatives for a character to which our market segment could relate. Under scrutiny were Jughead (of Archie Comic fame), Veronica (also of Archie comic fame), and Garfield. For each of the choices, we analyzed the pros and cons and then came up with our hypotheses.