Is the Swiss market an appropriate place for launching Avon Cosmetics?.
(Avon is an American firm producing cosmetics for men and women that are distributed on the basis of multi level marketing, i.e. individual distributors personally market the products, since the latter should not actually be sold in stores).
Stage 1: Results from conducted secondary research.
The following data is from 2002 and is compared 1) to Swiss data from 2001 and 2000 and 2) in some cases to data from 7 other European countries, respectively, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Great Britain, The Netherlands and Belgium, in order to be able to make more meaningful comparisons.
• Population 7.3 million - the smallest of the 7 nations with a GDP of 273.1 billion USD, putting it in sixth place after The Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy, France and Germany. This suggests at first glance that there might not be a huge source of potential customers as compared to the rest of Europe but the other nations have much larger territory and population so this could be an explanation, but additional information is needed. 20.8% in Switzerland are foreigners, meaning that this would be a pattern of consumer behaviour that would be difficult to track but the number is also sufficiently small to be ignored at this stage. However, later on, it may be important to determine whether there is a concentration of foreigners in any specific city which may lead to a change in marketing patterns.
• Mortality rate - 0.89%, the lowest of the group. Could suggest that people are highly interested in taking care of themselves in order to reach old age. This could also possibly include preserving their outer appearance as well as their health, however, additional information will be necessary to determine whether this is true or not. High interest in preserving one's health does not always imply regular use of skin products, for example.