Mengoptimalkan Keterbatasan Alokasi Dana Pemasaran untuk Meningkatkan Penjualan 3M Water Filtration

As a execution of final task project case improvement, authors was involved as a member of internship program at PT 3M Indonesia for four month and responsible for help 3M WATER FILTRATION marketing teams to markets the product to B2B market. The goal of PCI is to identify problem, analizing business condition, and propose alternative solution for the problem faced by 3M WATER FILTRATION marketers. Internship activity helpful to introducing working environment for collecting product information, field report data, and business analyze to find problem faced that must be solved as soon as possible. 3M WATER FILTRATION is a water filtration product that one of the line is specialized for food services industry. The product is champion on technology use such as carbon block, hollow-fibre membrane, and SQC that can not found on competitor product. Technology highness made product selling price more expensive than competitor. The sales were low even with superior quality, because markets brand awareness and trust also low. That problem caused by scare of marketing effectivity from the first year, lately the root cause found that teams has budget limitation allocated for marketing activities. The main theory to analyze and establish marketing strategic plan is a “Industrial Communication” (Havaldar 2005) by using steps for making B2B marketing strategy, there are choosing objective, target audience, budget allocation, developing themes and message, and the right media for marketing and promotion tools. The supporting theories are ”Marketing Public Relations” (Duncan 2002) and “Response Generation” (Kern 2001) used for making alternative solution method. Authors create several alternative solutions as a problem solving by optimizing the budget limit to increase market awareness of brand, therefore sales would effective and efficient. So the alternative solution that has made are: 1. Advertisement placement for 3M WATER FILTRATION product on specialized food industry and services. 2. Marketing public relations by making special event together with food service company for them and their consumer. 3. Make publicity using website or weblog with particular content about water product information, and water treatment technology. 4. Participating special exhibition event for food service industry as exhibitor while optimizing personal selling activities. 5. Increase direct marketing program activity by direct response advertising. The best alternative solution for problem solving for this time is “Participating special exhibition event for food service industry as exhibitor while optimizing personal selling activities” because it could reach marketing target effectively to explain what is 3M WATER FILTRATION and what is benefit for them by using personal selling. That alternative were become major priority, but it need support from other marketing activity to realising the objective, increasing market brand awareness and product sales easily.