New Balance Atheletic Shoes
Maintaining Quality: New balance customers are not price sensitive. Instead they are more interested in good quality product. Hence the future development of new capacity addition at different location can jeopardize the quality of product. It is highly dependant on how much workers at that location are skilled. Moreover multisite operation can also make it difficult to produce similar products with no difference. So this is the area where Davis needs to focus on.
Rankings: The rankings of company’s top models have gone down. The, 320, had fallen from first to eight. Similarly the rankings of other product have also fallen down. If this kind of deterioration continues for few more periods, there will be reduction in demand for New Balance. And the current estimated forecast could be reduced.
New product development: The Company takes too much time in new product development. The top product, 320, took around six months. In the coming days, with more players’ entry, competition will become too fierce. Then new products must be developed in shorter time. Company also does not have any formal R&D facility for this. Another company Brooks has more market share than New Balance. The main reason is the successful product development strategy of Brooks.
Market shift to Price competition: In future, some of the larger goods companies are bound to enter in the market at some point of time. In that scenario, prices could become more important. Moreover, there is need to increase the number of dealers as only 1200 dealer network is working for New Balance. This is very less as compared to competitors.
Sales and Marketing: the company is fighting with big players like Nike, Adidas etc. There is a need to position the product in right market at right time by proper advertising and branding. New balance had only sold small number of shoes (6000 pairs) in the international market. It is expected that demand would expand if a sales network