Mercedes-Benz's Marketing Strategy in Mexico

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, EGADE Business School, language: English, abstract: The automobile industry is famous for being ahead of the curve in most areas. Automotive companies cannot rely on a one-time announcement or word-of-mouth chatter to keep a steady stream to customers. These companies have to have well developed advertising strategies in their marketing processes, in order to sustain a profitable growth in all the markets they serve throughout the world. Mercedes-Benz (MB) is a German high-class automobile company. Its products stand for luxury, reliability and dependability. The company belongs to the multinational division of the German manufacturer Daimler AG and has its headquarters in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The company has 274,616 employees and gained a profit of 10,887 billion U.S. dollar with revenue of 147,257 billion U.S. dollars. Mexico is very important for the company’s North American strategy, which can be proved by the fact that Mercedes-Benz produces its cars in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. According to the McKinsey Global Media Report 2013 Latin America provided the highest growth in expenditure for advertising, in 2012 the increase was 13.3 percent. The increasing investments of automotive companies are a reason for it - in 2011 the industry expanded its expenditures in advertising by 101 percent. A critical analysis of the MB’s marketing strategy in Mexico is the purpose of this research paper. Since we are not able to cover all aspects of the marketing of MB due to the limitation of 10 to 15 pages for this paper, the study will be focusing on the following areas: sponsoring, social media, TV advertisements and magazine commercials. Thus, other areas of marketing like brand management or viral marketing will not be addressed. The products and services the company offers in Mexico will be mentioned. The marketing strategy of Mercedes-Benz México will be described and target groups will be defined. At the end of this paper we will state how MB can use its marketing in Mexico more efficiently in order to gain higher profits.