Gillette - Marketing in Spain

Essay by PabloDionUniversity, Bachelor's November 2008

download word file, 2 pages 0.0

At the moment, Gillette has around 28,000 employees worldwide, controls more than 60% of the world market and is present in 145 countries.

The Gillette strategy is a global strategy, and a global strategy provides numerous advantages. The market for shaving is huge, with people throughout the world needing and using shaving products with the frame of mind that shaving is not a luxury, it is a necessity. This is throughout Europe and the world. Consumption becomes increasingly homogeneous around the world by a convergence of needs. This peculiarity of the market shaving system enhances the hypothesis of standardization of production and of the marketing variables.

Currently, Gillette's strategy has been honed to a new level of sophistication. Each new model of razor has a unique design such that only blade refills made to those exact specifications will fit. When possible, the designs are patented so that third parties are prevented from selling their own refills; Gillette, meanwhile, charges a small fortune for their blades, and customers dutifully buy them.

Predictably, when a patent expires, opening the market for generic competitors, Gillette releases a new design, along with a new marketing campaign geared toward making people with last year's model feel like they are outdated.

After studying Gillette's marketing strategy within Spain, I can see that there are no significant differences comparing it with other different countries. There are only visible differences with the personnel used to promote the company, such as David Beckham-who is a global icon. Gillette uses a more global strategy; they also use what is called "loss-leader" marketing. In general terms, a loss leader is a product sold at a loss in order to generate secondary sales later on. In some cases, a loss-leader product does not produce dependencies that lead to other sales directly, but...