ALO case study : entering a new market : getting back on track after getting lost
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to study the influence of ALO’s positioning and targeting on its business, and how it can compromise the entire activity. ALO is an American brand, launched in 2008 in the USA, with the goal of selling natural beverages produced directly through the well-known Aloe Vera plant, providing the consumer with several health and dietary benefits, together with a great taste. In 2013 ALO was already the number 1 bestselling brand within the Aloe Vera beverage segment, and the number 2 bestselling brand within the functional beverage segment, among the markets of USA and Canada. It was also during this same year of 2013 that António Lopes decided to introduce ALO in Portugal and give the opportunity to the Portuguese population to include this amazing drink in their lives and daily activities. While people’s minds are changing towards a healthier and balanced life associated with healthier products’ consumption, the success and acceptance of ALO can’t be considered “black in white”. To make this thesis possible, a complex and thorough study and research was performed and tools used include a Literature Review where the concepts and theory were studied to better address the following parts of the thesis; a Case Study written including a proposal of analysis to be used during class discussions; and a Market Research involving interviews with the company, Survey and Focus Groups. Being ALO a 100% natural beverage with healthy and dietary benefits, António’s first approach was to focus on the part of the population that practise sports on a regular basis and on places dedicated to natural products, ending up with an unsustainable business. With the objective of giving people the opportunity of gathering the pleasure and taste together with the health and dietary benefits, ALO reached the conclusion that the consumer is the average Portuguese citizen, above 15, looking for a balanced life style, trying to keep a healthy life. ALO drink needs to be seen first as a great drink, with the bonus of being healthy and having great benefits – the consumer is more worried with the image, and benefits are the differentiation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".