Marketing Strategy to Increase Company Sales (Case Study on CV. Sari Nikmat Semar)

: Bakso is one of the well-known foods in Indonesia. Those words supported the data of the increase in bakso package consumption in Indonesia in the last couple years. Bandung being the largest area for the increasing bakso package consumption compared to the other cities. This creates a large potential market to increase the sales for the company. However, this situation is different for CV. Sari Nikmat Semar. The company has faced a decrease in their sales especially in the last two years. It is found that the company did not have a marketing strategy to gain their customers in the current market competition. Several studies have mentioned that promotion mix would impact the changing of customer attitude into the purchase intention. Within this situation, this research will find out (1) the effect of internal analysis towards the promotion of the company (2) the effect of external analysis towards the promotion of the company. This analysis will conduct on how the promotion mix influences the changing on customer attitude towards their purchase intention into bakso package products. This research uses mixed methods by doing the in-depth interview and survey questionnaire of the customer that has experience on purchased bakso package products. The author collected the data by coming directly into several traditional markets in Bandung with the main focus on promotion mix. The author finds that there is a differentiation between promotion mix that is chosen by result from in-depth interviews and questionnaire surveys. This research came up with the conclusion that promotion mix will impact customer attitude on doing the process of purchase period. This will help to increase sales of the company.


INTRODUCTION
Based on data from DataBoks, Indonesia now has 37 provinces and contains the various options of special culinary from the respectives region.On Saragih (2000), there are some various food processes that interest consumers nowadays, it is meat processed products which fulfill practical and efficient functions, namely, ready to use, ready to cook and ready to eat.Based on Astawan (2008), Bakso is a meat process product mixed with flour and spices and other ingredients that are mashed, then formed into spheres and then boiled until it is cooked.Bakso packages are currently chosen by peoples due to data on an increase of consumption of branded bakso packaged since 2019-2021.Bandung has the highest increase of consumption compared to the other cities and this creates an opportunity for the bakso companies to increase their sales due to this condition.Therefore, there are only some brand names that are well recognized by the consumer in Bandung specifically.Those things are important to note for other brands to increase their brand awareness and sales, one of the brands that compete on this market is CV.Sari Nikmat Semar.CV.Sari Nikmat Semar is one of the food process companies in Bandung since 1996.At first, it was merely a homemade factory company until it upgraded as a middle-size company.The company is consistent and highly committed to produce delectable and healthy products to their consumers as they did not use harmful material to produce their product.They have more than 20 product variants of bakso which are divided into several categories and grades, there are 3 categories being offered i.e. based on size, form, and filling.Based on grade it is divided into the application of bakso main ingredients i.e. meat and flour.At the moment, CV.Sari Nikmat Semar, market their product variant in the same trademark and target market through their reseller.Under those categories, the company needs to increase the awareness of several products to their consumers.However, CV.Sari Nikmat Semar in the situation of not completely running their business as a traditional or a modern company.In terms of marketing strategy, the company accentuates their loyal consumers known as their reseller to get their company revenue and the other marketing strategy is word of mouth.Whereas in the current market competition is being a highly competitive market.To enhance consumer awareness and company revenue, CV.Sari Nikmat Semar has some marketing strategies to enlarge their scope of market.

Consumer Decision Making Process
Psychology plays an important role in how the consumer understands what they want in their purchase decision.The company needs to understand their consumer wants when they are in the decision making process.While the customer makes a decision about the goods or services for themselves, they have to go through several processes until they make a purchase and furthermore do the post purchase decision.This process could be seen within the traditional model of decision making process that adapted from Stankevich (2017), following as:

Consumer Knowledge
In business we need to know the behavior of consumers, one of the behaviors on how the knowledge of customers towards the product.Efforts to model the consumer decision process relied heavily, at least implicitly, on the concept of consumer knowledge (Engel, Blackwell, & Miniard 1990;Howard & Seth, 1969;Nicosia, 1966).Knowledge is cognitive which that still in our brain, plenty studies are investigated on the role of cognitive aspects including how we perceived the value or benefit from the product, memory recall, and information process or attention also on how consumer perceived positive and real emotion (Altarteer & Charissis, 2019; Bramley et al., 2019; Kang et al., 2021).The consumers often react emotionally to such service failures (Khamittov et al., 2020).Emotion of the consumer might be one of the factors on how the consumer is aware of the product.

Brand Awareness
Brand defined as devoted to building better understanding in the area of brand choice or preference, brand loyalty and brand extensions (Moree, et. al, 2008).There is a statement from the expert on how important brand awareness which is stated that brand awareness has fundamental and foremost limitations in any brand related search and directly affects consumer purchase decisions (Kapferer, 2008).Brand awareness is defined as the ability of potential customers to recognize and to remember that a certain brand belongs to a certain category of products (Aaker, 1991).This thing has a correlation between the brand with integrated marketing communication (Luxton, Reid & Mavondo, 2017).Integrated marketing communication could perceive customer memory towards the product or services.Moreover, integrated marketing communication is aligned with awareness of the brand.When the customer is aware of the product or services it could develop a better connection to understand, react, and respond to the marketing communication of the brand.This process could lead to the customer decision making in terms of purchasing the product or services.

Customer Attitudes
In the consumer decision making process, the customer does the information search and processing before making a decision.Furthermore, the customer would respond/ interpret the information they received which creates their attitude towards the product.
Attitudes are evaluating the attributes of one product that construct an important aspect of a product.In addition, attitudes contain three components which are cognitive function, affective function, and conative function.These component is showing down below In English Dictionary, cognitive refers to the mental process involved in knowing, learning, and understanding.The cognitive is aligned with our thought which relates to the individual's beliefs and knowledge about the attributes.However, affective has a definition of acquisitions of behaviors that reflects feelings, attitudes, appreciations, and values (Lashari, 2015).These behaviors tend to evaluate the product or brands based on their feelings whether they like it or not.The last component is conative.Based on Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, conative could be defined as connected to the mental process that makes you want to do something or decide to do something.This relates to the post behavior of customers after they evaluate the product that uses their feelings.

Consumer Behavior
Consumer behavior can be defined as how the consumer affective responses (emotional), cognitive responses (mental), and behavioral responses to goods and their marketing.Consumers attribute positives, negatives or neutral sentiments to a product or brand depending on their experience with it (Carnein et al., 2017; Heuchert, 2019).Within this experience, the consumer responds with their emotional, behavior, sensorial, etc to the product or brand.There are several benefits by studying consumer behavior which could increase business performance, influence public policy, and also help the consumer make better decisions.We could conclude that consumer behavior combines the process of consumer experience when they make a purchase over the product or brand.This process is impacted by internal and external factors which are cultural factors, social factors, personal factors, and psychological factors (Singh, Dhayal, Shamim & Humanity, 2014).

Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey can be defined as the complete cycle of experience that customers go through when interacting with an organization.It is a visual, process-oriented method for conceptualizing and analyzing peoples experience, usually represented by customer journey maps (Terragni & Hassani, 2018).Customer journey map is using all of the customer information and data available to you from across the business and delivering process and structure to their experience (Matthew Fairweather, 2016).The customer journey map could help the company to identify customer pain points, improve customer retention, improve marketing efforts, and understand the customer better.Customer journey mapping contains a pre-purchase, purchase, and post purchase experience of the customer toward the product or services in term of evaluate customer journey on process their past until their future experience.The first step of customer journey maps, which is the pre-purchase period is consists of problem recognition, .With accurate and relevant information for their needs and wants it would lead into their purchase decision.In order to deliver information towards the customer, the brand needs promotion tools and integrated communication in order to convey the right message that is well received by the customer.This stage could gain customer expectation to the company itself.Furthermore, in the purchase period it contains choice, order, and payment (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016).In the purchase period, the customer has already chosen the product they want to purchase and made a payment for that product.Furthermore, this period would gain customer perception towards the product because in this stage they would experience the product.In addition, this period plays an important role in customer journey in order to improve the post-purchase experience towards the product or services.In the post-purchase period, the customer could consume the product or services and could create their behavior towards the brand.The customer could receive well and return to purchase or not to the product or services in the future.This behavior also could make the customer share their good or bad experience with other people about their experience toward the product.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The author tries to conduct information from the internal and external factors to gain more understanding towards the problem that is faced by the company.Moreover, in order to understand the business situation, the author also analyzes supported data on the company's marketing mix, sales, customer analysis, and competitor analysis.Marketing mix conduct of price, product, promotion, and place or distribution which has a definition as the set of controllable variables a firm can use to influence buyer response (Kotler, 1967).In order to generate the issue that is faced by the company, the author does the customer analysis by interviewing and surveying the customers.Within this information it helps the author to confirm the problem of the company and creates the research questions and objectives on this research.In addition, to validate those data, the author will do the questionnaire survey towards the customers who have been experiencing on purchase bakso products.

Exploratory Design
The author uses mixed research, both qualitative and quantitative, as the methodology in this research topic.The research will use the exploratory design and it would draw down below: interviews are divided into three types of categories which can be standardized/ structured interview, semi-standardized/ semistructured interview, and unstandardized/ unstructured interview (Babbie, 2007).The researcher tends to use semi-structured interviews to enable the interviewee to elaborate on certain issues (Dörnyei, 2007).Furthermore, the unstandardized/ unstructured interview consists of a flexible question interview, open ended interview, and obtaining detailed information even though it is challenging to conduct responses.There is no set answer to the questions and the interview follows the direction of participant's responses (Moylee, 2002).The participants are going to ask about their experiences on purchasing bakso packaged with an open question on telling their story about their (good and bad) experiences from the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase period at the moment they do a purchase on bakso packaged.This data is stimulated in order to clarify or understand the answer that is not clear besides the question from the author's list.

Survey
The author also does the survey to verify if there is a positive relation on promotional mix with the changed attitude of customers towards purchase intention of bakso package products.Each questions of promotion mix is use the likert scale with the score given for each scales is: 1 = Totally disagree (+1) 2 = Disagree (+2) 3 = Neutral (+3) 4 = Agree (+4) 5 = Totally Disagree (+5) In the last question, the author makes the customer give a rank from the most interested to the least interest of the promotion mix to find out which promotion mix has influenced the customer interest.This survey consists of three constituent models that includes X (X1, X2, X3, X4, and X5), Y1, and Y2.This would be stated in two models of dependent and independent variables which is following as:  Model 1: X1 (Advertising) + X2 (Personal Selling) + X3 (Direct Marketing) + X4 (Public Relation) + X5 (Sales Promotion) → Y1 (Attitude)  Model 2: Y1 (Attitude) → Y2 (Purchase Intention) In order to analyze the quantitative research, the author uses the SPSS to help make interpretation for the result.The SPSS interpret the data of author's hypothesis in order to find the correlation between promotion mix with attitude and attitude towards purchase intention.

RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
In order to create strong strategies, a company needs to analyze the internal and external factors that could help the company to develop and improve the activity of the company.Based on internal and external analysis that author's do, there are several pieces of information that could be used in order to create strategies for the CV.Sari Nikmat Semar current situation.

Internal Analysis
This analysis could be used in order of understanding the current and potential capabilities of the company.The author used the segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP) and 4P's marketing mix to gain the big picture of CV.Sari Nikmat Semar situation with the understanding of the segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP) and marketing mix is the important model to identify the market and meet the specification of customer needs and wants.In this research, the main issue that is faced by the company is the promotion tools that are used by the CV.Sari Nikmat Semar.Promotion is indeed a part of the marketing mix model which could impact the behavior of the customer.

Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning
1. Segmenting CV.Sari Nikmat Semar segmenting their market based on demographic, socio-economic, geographic and psychographic.Based on demographic, the company chooses their segmentation with the range group of 25-45 years old with a mature woman as their segment.In terms of socio-economic segmentation, the company chooses the low to middle class customers segment due to their places of distribution.Furthermore, the company chooses the area that has traditional markets which are their main distribution

Survey
Based on the analysis above, it could be concluded that the promotion mix has an influence on the attitude of the customer even though it is not significant.However, with the increase of promotion mix on the product it will align with the increase of the attitude of customers.Furthermore, each variable of the promotion mix has a positive influence towards the attitude of customers.Based on the result, advertising and sales promotion has p-value less than α with the definition of both variables significantly influencing the attitude.In addition, personal selling, direct marketing, and public relation has a p-value more than α which does not significantly influence the attitude.This analysis has a different result with the customer journey experience analysis in which promotion mixes variables that influence the attitude of the customer.Hence, based on result between the attitude influence purchase intention of the customer, it discovered that attitude has a positive and significant influence on the purchase intention.On the other hand, promotion mix could influence the purchase intention of customers with the changes on their attitudes towards the products.

Competitor Analysis
Based on an interview with the respondent, there are only several brands that come into the respondents mind when talking about bakso packaged products.Bakso Mawar, Cihampelas, and Alam are the most mentioned of the interview participants as their top of mind brands in the case of bakso package products.There are several factors that make those brands in their top of mind which stated that those brands have been recognized in Bandung from a long period of time, have a positive image in a long period of time, have a good taste, and are easily found.

BUSINESS SOLUTION
The author tries to give suggestions for the solution of those problems by using the customer journey mapping in order to build a strong promotional strategy for customers.Start with the pre-purchase period, in order to gain customer awareness over the product of CV.Sari Nikmat Semar, the company could do several activities that build customer recognition.Based on the survey result, there is a positive significance between advertisement and attitude that lead into the purchase intention, within this situation the company could take those data as an opportunity to gain customer attention.The company could create visual attractions in seller kiosks at traditional markets using banners with the content of the availability of the product of CV.Sari Nikmat Semar on those places, for instance banners with words of "Bakso Semar Ada Disini!".This could make the customer attract and recognize those products with the positive possibility of customer curiosity of the product.After customers recognize the product, the next step could be questions from customers towards the product information.Based on the interview, while customers have difficulties choosing the bakso package product due to various options, they tend to seek information by asking the seller on traditional market kiosks.Within this situation, the seller plays an important role of giving information which could attract customers' interest towards the product.After the pre-purchase, there is a purchase period which could change the attitude of the customer in order to choose, order, and pay for the product.The recommendation from the seller is one of the factors that could change the attitude from the customer towards the purchase intention.The company needs to make the seller give a recommendation of their product when the customer wants to purchase a bakso package product.The other activity to change customer attitude is with giving several sales promotions to the customer, for instance buy 1 get 1 free, discount, and free delivery if the company does the online channel distribution.The sales promotion gives the impact to the customer for choosing the product, it happens when the author tries to give a free product sample to the potential customer.In order to make customer retention on CV.Sari Nikmat Semar product, there are several activities that could be done by the company.Customer satisfaction is needed to create a good impression about the product which could lead them into the repurchase of the product and furthermore they could turn into a loyal customer.

CONCLUSION
The conclusion of this research has objectives in order to resolve the problem of CV.Sari Nikmat Semar current condition.Based on interviews, CV.Sari Nikmat Semar has three biggest competitors which are on customer top of mind, those are Bakso Mawar, Bakso Cihampelas, and Bakso Alam.There is a big difference in distribution channel and promotion strategy between the company and competitors, especially Bakso Mawar and Bakso Cihampelas.Those brands promote their products with both offline and online store platforms using the personal selling, public relation, advertising, and sales promotion as their promotion mix in order to increase their sales.Furthermore, based on interviews with customers that have experience on purchased bakso package products, there are several factors that give a high effect on their behavior towards the purchase intention for instance the recommendation

Figure III .
Figure III.Exploratory Design from Creswell and Plano Clark Source: Designing and Conducting Mixed Method Research