RKS Case Assignment

RKS Guitars is your first written assignment case. The case focuses on a real company with an innovative guitar concepts that needs to be marketed. The case takes place in January 2005 at the National Association of Musical Merchants (NAMM) semiannual meeting. At the same meeting the previous year (NAMM 2014), the company introduced its product prototypes and received an enthusiastic welcome from attending guitar aficionados and dealers. Since then, RKS has significantly increased production and opened a new manufacturing facility in North Carolina. In addition, the company partnered with Hohner, a German manufacturer of accordions, harmonicas, and lower-priced guitars, to break into the old-boys network of US guitar dealers. Hohner, however, has not delivered the results that the company expected.

The company needs to decide how to best market its products. Your job is to make a recommendation to the lead character at RKS how to proceed based on your understanding of consumer attitudes about guitars and the new design. Some questions to consider are:

• Based on the case information on various personas (a term use in the case that is similar in meaning to lifestyle segment profiles), who do you think is the best target customer for RKS Guitars?

• What is the best way to market the RKS Guitar to the persona you have chosen?

• Do you think it makes sense at this stage in the company's history to design a line of guitars to attract different persona segments? If yes, which segments would you choose, and what should be different about the guitars for each segment?

• How are the different segments likely to make a decision about buying an RKS Guitar? Would they all make decisions the same way?

• How would culture influence the different segments?

• How are they most likely to form attitudes about guitars? And to what types of attitude-changing efforts are they most likely to respond?