Question: MARKETING STRATEGY -Create A New Product For Gatorade

Here's the details of the report:

The year is 2001. Gatorade is failing. They are losing market share to Powerade. PepsiCo bought Gatorade in 1997 and bolstered them for a few years, but eventually the benefits gained from working with Pepsi diminished and the product value went with it. Pepsi brings you and your team in to run Gatorade as it's failing, with the mandate that you increase consumption of your core product.

Question/Option1: To regain market share and consumer perception, you can spend a lot of money on R&D to come up with complimentary products that enhance and bolster an athlete's overall sports nutrition, then bring those products to market with the necessary product tie-ins and all the marketing with it. At the same time, you will have to rebrand Gatorade to a full-line product and not a stand-alone drink. The overall cost for this is very high and the risk is also very high. The outcome, if successful, could completely change the future of the drink - and potentially the industry.

You're going to have to do research, figure out how the product lines would work, what the marketing structure should be, how to arrange everything, have a sense of costing, etc.

Your mission is to validate this perspectives against OPTION 2 (why is option 1 better than this):

Edit the Gatorade recipe and come up with something that consumers find more effective, adding a variety of styles of Gatorade (including a water line) that specifically target non-athletes who like the idea of Gatorade without wanting all the "nutrients". This requires less R&D, has an overall lower cost and lower risk. The outcome is also smaller, in that they might not gain share from Powerade, but they could complete with other drinks, like SmartWater and VitaminWater, thus increasing their overall market share.

Use ideas from the internet to create a new product line!