TRAP-EASE: THE BIG CHEESE OF MOUSETRAPS One April morning, Martha House, president of Trap-Ease, entered her office in M

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TRAP-EASE: THE BIG CHEESE OF MOUSETRAPS
One April morning, Martha House, president of Trap-Ease, entered
her office in Moncton, New Brunswick. She paused for a moment to
contemplate the Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation that she had framed
and hung near her desk: “If a man can make a better mousetrap than
his neighbour, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
Perhaps, she thought, Emerson knew something that she didn’t. She
had the better mousetrap –Trap-Ease –but the world didn’t seem to
be all that excited about it.Her product was far superior to others
in the industry, but for some reason she could not sell it
successfully.Martha had just returned from the National Hardware
Show in Toronto. Standing in the trade show display booth for long
hours and answering the same questions hundreds of time shad been
tiring. Yet this show had excited her. Each year National Hardware
Show officials hold a contest to select the best new product
introduced at the show. Of the more than 300 new products
introduced at this year’s show, her mousetrap had won first place.
Such fame was not new for the Trap-Ease mousetrap. Canadian
Business magazine had written an article about the mouse trap and
the television show Market place and trade publications had
featured it. Despite all of this attention, however, the expected
demand for the trap had not materialized. Martha hoped that the
trade show award might stimulate increased interest and sales. A
group of investors who had obtained worldwide rights to market the
innovative mousetrap had formed Trap-Ease in January.In return for
the marketing rights, the group agreed to pay the inventor and
patent holder, a retired rancher, a royalty fee for each trap sold.
The group then hired Martha to serve as president and to develop
and manage the Trap-Ease organization. A plastics firm under
contract with Trap-Ease manufacture the mousetrap, which was a
simple yet clever device. The trap consists of a square plastic
tube measuring about 15 cm long and 4 cm square. The tube bends in
the middle at a 30-degree angle so that when the front part of the
tube rests on a flat surface the other end is elevated (see exhibit
one for a photograph of the Trap-Ease). The elevated end holds a
removable cap into which the user puts bait (such as cheese, dog
food, or some other attractant). A hinged door is attached to the
front end of the tube. When the trap is open, this door rests on
two narrow stilts attached to the bottom corners of the door. The
trap works with simple efficiency. A mouse, smelling the bait,
enters the tube through the open end. As it walks up the angled
bottom toward the bait, its weight makes the elevated end of the
trap drop downward. This elevates the open end, allowing the hinged
door to swing closed, trapping the mouse. Small teeth on the ends
of the stilts catch in a groove on the bottom of the trap, locking
the door closed. The mouse can be disposed of live, or it can be
left alone for a few hours to suffocate in the trap.Martha believed
that the trap had many advantages for the consumer when compared to
the traditional spring-loaded traps or poisons. It appeals to
consumers who want a humane alternative to spring traps, as they
can release the mouse back outside (provided that they find one in
a trap before it suffocates). Furthermore, with Trap-Ease,consumers
can avoid the unpleasant mess they encounter with spring-loaded
traps; there are no clean-up problems. Finally, the consumer can
choose to clean and reuse the trap, or simply throw the entire
thing in the garbage. Martha’s early research ledher to decide that
women were the best target market for the Trap-Ease. Martha had
interview 25 men and 25 women exiting a Home Depot store in
Moncton, and men, it seemed, were more willing to buy and use the
traditional spring-loaded trap. Twenty of the men preferred the
traditional trap while only 12 of the women preferred the
traditional trap. Women, Martha, concluded, wanted a means of
dealing with the mouse problem that avoids the unpleasantness and
risks that the standard trap creates in the house.
2To reach this target market, Martha decided to distribute
Trap-Ease through national grocery, hardware and drugstore chains
such as Loblaws, Sobeys, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Canadian Tire, and
Shoppers Drug Mart. She planned to sell the trap directly to these
large retailers, avoiding any intermediaries.The traps sold in
packages of two, with a suggested retail price of $3.29for the
package of two traps. Although this price made the Trap-Ease about
five times more expensive than smaller, standard traps, consumers
appeared to believe that the Trap-Ease had value. The manufacturing
cost of each Trap-Ease trap, including freight and packaging costs,
was about $0.41 per trap. An additional $0.08 was paid per trap to
the inventor as a royalty. Martha priced each trap at $1.59, but
allowed for trade promotions and volume discounts, which would like
result in net revenue of $1.39 per trap.To promote the product,
Martha had budgeted approximate $60,000 for the first year in
marketing expenses. She planned to use $50,000 of this amount for
travel costs to go to trade shows across North America, and to make
sales visits to her target customers (the retailers listed above),
whose head offices were mostly located in Toronto. She planned to
use the remaining $10,000 for advertising. Because the mousetrap
had generated so much publicity, however, she had not felt the need
to do much advertising. Still, she placed ads in Chatelaine
magazine and other home magazines targeted towards women. Martha
was the company’s only salesperson, but she intended to hire new
sales representatives soon.Martha had initially estimated that
500,000 Trap-Ease units would have been sold in the first year, but
after four months of operations, only a few hundred units had been
sold (mostly from Trap-Ease’s own website, and mostly from people
who personally knew Martha, the inventor, or the investors). Martha
wondered whether it was common for new products to get off to such
a slow start, or whether she was doing something wrong. She knew
there potential opportunities and problems, but none of them really
worried her very much. First, there had not been a lot of repeat
buying by those who had bought one. Second, she noticed that when
she did have a meeting with a retail purchaser, they were more
interested in keeping the mousetrap in their office as a novelty or
conversation-starter. Martha was frustrated by this, as she wanted
store employees to demonstrate the traps to customers. This made
Martha consider whether customers were buying the mousetraps to
actually use or for some other reason. Third, there was a large
commercial market for pest-control devices like mousetraps that
Martha knew nothing about, but that might make an attractive target
for Trap-Ease. Last, Martha had made no changes to the physical
product or the packaging, and she thought that there might be the
possibility for improvements there too, but with all her travel she
simply did not have time to focus on anything but sales.Martha also
knew that the investor group believed that Trap-Ease had a
once-in-a-lifetime chance, and she sensed the group’s impatience.
She had budgeted approximately $150,000 in administrative and fixed
costs (including her salary) for the first year separate from
the$60,000marketing budget. To keep the investors happy the company
needed to sell at least enough traps to cover those costs and make
a reasonable profit.In the first few months Martha had learned that
marketing a new product is not an easy task. For example, she had
made a breakthrough sale to a small national hardware chain that
placed a good-sized order with Trap-Ease. The hardware retailer had
provided specific instructions that the order was to be delivered
to their warehouse loading dock between 1:00 and 3:00 PM on a
specific day. When the truck delivering the order had arrived late,
the retailer had refused to accept the shipment and informed Martha
that they would not even consider doing business with Trap-Ease
again for at least a year. Martha thought that maybe she should
re-think her marketing strategy. “I think that I should go to the
investors for an additional $50,000 to do more consumer research,
and then develop a totally new marketing strategy, because
something isn’t working.”
Please provide RECOMMENDATIONS, PROBLEMS, ALTERNATE
ACTIOS AND DECISION CRITERIA?