Aarong is one the most popular and leading handicraft and ethnic lifestyle brands in Bangladesh.
It has started their journey back in 1978 under BRAC initiative to empower rural artisans and
craftsman. It has supported almost 65000 rural artisans across the country. Throughout the last
decade it has gain major attention and name for themselves also as a fashion retail brand who
promotes Bengali ethnicity and tradition through their products to mass market. But over the
years, there are several major competitors arrived in the market and deshi dosh and their ten
brands are the strong one who are competing with Aarong. Apart from the emergence of these
competition, Aarong is currently in their “maturity” stage in terms of product life cycle. Even in
terms of Michael Porter’s five competitive forces theory, threat of new entrants is high, threat of
substitute is moderate, bargaining power of suppliers is low, and bargaining power of customers
is moderate. So the threat of upcoming competitors overtaking the market is quite high along
with bargaining power of suppliers is low which give Aarong the opportunity to extent their
number of artisans by investing more money which initially can be done by lower bargaining
power of suppliers. So overall the whole market situation indicates that, Aarong should extent
their market and capture major attention of customers by grabbing new market share. And one of
the major ways to achieve this target is, revising the market targeting and coming up with new
strategic positioning strategy for Aarong. In terms of targeting strategy, Aarong is currently
following “extensive targeting approach” where they serve multiple segments with product
variety, in terms of revised targeting, we are going to suggest Aarong to take “selective targeting
approach” where Aarong should target “niche segment” and in those niche segments there will
be “older customers” and “students” and they should also target to offer “product specialization”
by putting more emphasis on “Nakashi Kantha”. And in terms of positioning strategy, Aarong is
following all the three positioning concepts like functional, symbolic, experiential positioning
concepts through their clothing & accessories, home textiles & décor items, jewelry items, metal,
leather items, bamboo goods and food items among customers. So to achieve revise positioning
strategy, they should more focus on enhancing “experiential positioning concept”. To come up
with revised positioning strategy Aarong has to adjust and change their marketing program
decisions. All the marketing components like, product, value chain, price, promotion and its
strategy has to revise according to revised targeting and positioning objectives.