Billabong

The main issues plaguing Billabong stem from the overarching failure to maintain a close relationship to its marketing environment, which consequently affected every aspect of the firm. Billabong lost focus on how the key players (i.e. the customers, competitors and corporate partners) can warrant a change in the marketing strategy, and failed to conform to the ever powerful customer consumer. Now, Billabong is searching for a way to “reinvent itself” in order to revive sales by staying true to its core brand, since their recent failure “maintain coolness and be cutting edge” has taken a toll on their bottom line. In Billabong’s past they were committed to their core, which focused on what surfers needed and wanted as far as clothing in order to better perform in their sport. Billabong began to move further from its core when the popularity for the “cut and stitched” board shorts for surfers gained popularity and then spread overseas, as well through other sports such as skateboarding and snowboarding. When Billabong began to create other cooperate alliances through acquisitions of companies like Tigerlilly which specializes in swimwear and VonZipper which specializes in eyewear, their focus drifted further way from their surfer customer.

The one problem that if solved, could potentially rein in the results that Billabong desires, would be to reconnect to what the consumer values and wants through designing a new marketing strategy. Designing a marketing strategy is consists of three different phases, building a plan to sustain a competitive advantage over other companies, identifying a marketing strategy, and designing an appropriate marketing product mix.

To build a sustainable competitive advantage Billabong needs to secure its position in this market to guard from competitors stealing the position that they currently occupy.

Customer excellence supports a sustainable competitive advantage and could be achieved by developing a sound value based strategy for...