Sustainable marketing for drugstore chain

As part of an extensive practical project in the fourth semester of the degree program in Business Management (now: Leadership & Business Management), ten students developed solutions for the optimal marketing of sustainable products with the aim of increasing sales, taking into account all aspects relevant to consumers. The drugstore chain dm, in particular, cannot imagine life today without the topic of sustainability, which resulted in a cooperation with the Kufstein University. The focus of this collaboration was on analyzing the effect of the marketing of sustainable products to date and on solution approaches to increase the lack of awareness of sustainable products among dm customers.

FOCUS GROUPS AS A BASIS FOR RESEARCH

The intensive work on this practical project gave the student team the opportunity to deal with the topics of empiricism and thus quantitative and qualitative research and to apply the knowledge they had acquired. By means of four focus group discussions and an online survey with 210 participants, the project group achieved a meaningful result and also integrated the evaluation of the interviews and ideas for solution approaches. Finally, the students developed an overall concept that includes the current situation and operational recommendations for action as well as strategic solution approaches.

TRANSPARENCY FOR QUALITY SEALS AND PRODUCT BUNDLES IN THE STORE

After completing the evaluations of the qualitative and quantitative research, the team analyzed the results and gained interesting insights, such as the frequently mentioned desire for a separate sustainability corner with exclusively sustainable products per product group. In addition, the variety of seals of approval placed on products leads to confusion and the associated uncertainty among customers, which reduces trust in seals and reduces the benefit of the products declared with them. Other aspects mentioned were the transparency of ingredients and the creation of awareness and implementation of a sustainable lifestyle.

Due to the demands placed on the team, there was no lack of work to be done, which created sustainable learning effects in the area of structured academic writing; academic paper and empirical research. In this way, the students consolidated the theoretical knowledge they had acquired through practical application in the project.