Case Study:

The Black & Decker Corporation (A)

Power Tools Division

Course:

International Marketing Management

Prof. Dr. Lutz H Schminke

Authors:

Marc Gerlach (323514)

Tobias Holler (725219)

Björn Kleindienst (425169)

Robin Mack (223377)

Marina Sukhareva (127387)

Celia Yan (431144)

Fulda, 24th May 2011

Table of Content

Table of Content 2

1. Introduction 2

2. Case Summary 3

2.1 The Black & Decker Corporation 3

2.2 The US power tools market 4

2.3 Black & Decker’s professional segment 4

3. SWOT-Analysis 5

4. How to deal with the insufficient brand awareness in the Professional- Tradesmen segment? 6

5. Conclusion 7

List of …show more content…

Strengths: An important strength of Black & Decker is a high product quality, which was proven by a number of laboratory and field tests. Furthermore, the company offered a lot of different products of a high standard. In addition, Black & Decker has higher brand awareness and much better service rates than their competitors.

Weaknesses: Despite a high brand awareness and product quality, Black & Decker only had a weak position on the Professional-Tradesman market. Responsible for that was the fact that in a Tradesman´s eyes Black & Decker products were made for private users, not for professionals. Another weakness was the colour of the company´s products. While their competition used highly differentiated colours to separate the consumer from the professional sector, Black & Decker decided to use black and charcoal grey, which led to confusion among the customers regarding product quality.

Opportunities: During that time span the Professional-Tradesmen segment was growing fastest compared to the other segments. Thanks to this, Black & Decker had the opportunity to gain market share relatively easily. To achieve this goal the company could have increased advertising as well as offered special deals to Professionals, e.g. “Buy 3 Tools and get the 4th for free!”. Another opportunity would have been to take over a competitor.