STP Analysis

I’m fairly comfortable with the organizational objective, marketing objective and source of volume sections of my project. I have discussed my findings and general direction in my last blog. I’m still looking for some objectivity in how to determine the percentages in 4B analysis. May be this will be revisited in today’s class as we were running out of time last week. If you want to look at the draft of my analysis so far I would be happy to share those with you.


The next stage of this project is to define the Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) aspect of this marketing plan and the first step is to define the set of category and dynamic variables. Remember that my customers for this marketing plan are the “donors”. Therefore, from a donor’s standpoint what are the category and dynamic variables when evaluating non-profits who are involved in “developing drinking water infrastructure”?

Category Variables: Desire to help people who struggle to access safe drinking water

Dynamic Variables: Transparency to the investments of donor’s money, Minimum overhead costs, Reputation of the brand, Years of experience, Religious affiliations, Cool factor

So with these let’s look at the current competitors of Charity Water:

Competitors: water.org, globalwater.org, dropinthebucket.org, waterforpeople.org and many more. Having so many players in this area is making the competitive analysis a bit difficult. How would you effectively do a comparison when the market is so fragmented? I’m sure you might have similar findings and therefore I’m looking forward to today’s discussion on competition.

Anyways, if I map the main and dynamic variables of charity water vis-à-vis some primary competitors I will have Charity Water dominate the dynamic variables of: transparency, overhead costs, reputation and cool factor but it will trail competitors in: years of experience and religious affiliation.

With the above analysis it becomes easier to visualize the targeted donors for charity water. I will take an attempt to describe my target donor as below:

Target donor description: John and Elizabeth Kaplan lives in a suburban community with their two children. Their household income is $90,000 and they donate between $300 and $500 in charity every year. They often donate to help immediate crisis situations such as the Haiti Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, Tsunami in SE Asia, etc. In addition, they donate for some of their close to heart issues such as global warming, children education, wild life protection etc. John particularly is aware of world issues and he loves listening to BBC news in NPR or PBS. John loves gadgets and he is always one of the first to buy new electronic items. Lately, he was checking the latest 3D LED TV from Samsung but $3000 price tag is too high for him and he decided to put that wish on hold for now. Elizabeth is a marathon runner and she loves the App in her iPhone which could monitor every aspect of her running. This family loves to travel and stay outdoors and they often volunteer in their community. They live an active lifestyle and believe in having fun in stuffs they do. They have a large circle of friends and are very passionate about their hobbies and beliefs.

With the above TA description let me now define the five-box positioning statement for Charity Water.

• Current Belief
    – Believe in making a difference by doing charities
• Current Do
    – Donate for Education, Global Warming, Disease and other global issues coz they need attention
• Proposition
    – Water crisis is a critical issue of our time having significant socio-economic ramifications
• Desired Belief
   – Drinking water crisis is real and people are suffering
• Desired Do
   – Donate for this cause to a non-profit which can deliver real impact