Principles of Marketing

 

 

 

 

Throughout this course you have explored all elements of a marketing plan. Now it is time to put your marketing plan together for the company you selected for your marketing manager internship.

Part A – General Information and Situational Analysis

Section 1 – Company Background

Describe the selected company and brand and a brief history.
Summarize the core products and services the company offers.
Identify direct current competitors and explain why they are direct competitors.
Section 2 – SWOT Analysis

Complete a SWOT analysis.
Propose the product or service line you want to develop a marketing plan for.
Justify your proposal with a SWOT-based argument for why it warrants marketing investment.
Section 3 – Macro- and Microenvironment

Analyze at least two elements from each quadrant of Table 8.1 in the course text as the micro- and macroenvironment factors that affect the company’s overall marketing strategy.
Part B – The Marketing Plan

Section 1 – Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP)

Describe your segmentation approach for your proposed product or service and provide rationale for this approach.
Describe the target audiences or markets.
Create a positioning statement.
Section 2 – The Marketing Mix

Formulate the four Ps for your proposed product or service:
Product
Describe your core product, extended product, and the product concept.
Explain how you plan to achieve competitive differentiation through creating customer value in four areas
Branding
Packaging
Support
Quality
Price
Place
Promotion with a special focus on digital media and integrated marketing communications (IMC)
Section 3 – Global and Ethical Considerations, and Conclusion

Identify three business or sociocultural considerations in translating your marketing plan for use in a foreign market.
Discuss the company’s policy or philosophy on one of the areas below:
corporate social responsibility (CSR
green marketing practices
ethics
ethical marketing
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices.
Conclude with a summary of your plan and why it deserves to be funded.
Helpful Tips

Part A
Section 1: Understanding the background of the company will help you complete the SWOT analysis. Use your Week 2 assignment and make sure you incorporated your instructor’s feedback and have improved your previously submitted work.
Section 2: Propose a new idea to market the product or service line. Avoid writing about or proposing the current marketing strategy. This is your idea, so use the SWOT analysis to defend it. Use your Week 2 assignment and make sure you incorporated your instructor’s feedback and have improved your previously submitted work.
Section 3: Use the information you researched and analyzed in the Week 4 video presentation to complete this section. Analyze some micro- and macroenvironment factors that affect the company’s overall marketing strategy globally. You need to provide enough details about the information you included in your slides to incorporate it with the rest of the paper.
Make sure you incorporated your instructor’s feedback.
Part B
Section 1: Use the information you researched and analyzed in the Week 4 discussion forum, Finding and Targeting Your People. You need to beef up the information you discussed in that discussion forum to align it with your overall marketing plan. Also, review and refer to Section 7.3 of the course text, Principles of Marketing.
Section 2: Spend considerable time completing the four P’s of your marketing plan; this is the essence of your plan. Someone should be able to understand your plan just by reading this section only.
Section 3: Research, analyze, and discuss your internship brand at the global level or in a foreign market. Also, discuss its CSR and DEI efforts.
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Principles of Marketing

 

Consumer decision-making process. Student can identify how marketing strategy can influence each of the steps in the consumer decision-making process.
Segmentation. Students can use the segmentation characteristics to identify and describe market segments.
Target market & strategy. Students can identify a usable market segment to be a target market and determine an appropriate target-market strategy
Positioning. Students can develop and interpret a perceptual map.

Directions

Refer to the product or service you selected for your first writing assignment. This week, you want to take a closer look at what consumer factors may be relevant for customers who are considering buying your product or service offering. This will require some critical thinking on your part based on your own behavior if you are a customer yourself, or you may want to talk to others who have purchased the product. Sometimes you can find clues when looking at the marketing messages that may be addressing some of these factors.
So far, you have only been considering the customers of your product or service as one big group, or a mass market. More astute marketing breaks down this large group into smaller market segments of consumers who have similar characteristics. For any specific product or service, there could be numerous market segments. However, company resources may only allow a company to pursue one or two or these market segments, which then become target market(s). In this paper, you should divide the mass market for your product or service into at least two market segments and then pick one target market you think would have the most potential for future growth.
Chances are you picked a product with which you are familiar. That is a good starting point, and you may represent one target market. But you may represent a target market that is saturated and therefore not the best target market to pick for the remainder of the semester. So be sure your second target market is different enough and represents growth potential.
If you did not do a thorough analysis of the competition in the prior writing assignment, you may need to go back and figure out the nature of the product’s or service’s competition. This will be important when you address the positioning of your product for your newly identified target market inasmuch as positioning is a competition-based concept.
Part 1

Consumer decision-making process. Go through the six steps of the purchase process outlined in the readings and identify where marketing can influence each of the six steps. For example, if a consumer just identified a need for your product in step one, then the company can advertise how your product fills that need. Or, if a consumer purchased your product, the consumer can be called and asked about their satisfaction with the product and if there is any dissatisfaction steps can be taken to ensure the customer satisfaction. Be sure to be more specific with respect to your product or service than this example.
Segmentation. View Table 5.1 of your Week 4 Reading, in Section 5.2, How Markets are Segmented. Using the various criteria of the segmentation bases described in Table 5.1, identify at least two distinct market segments for your product or service. Each market segment description must include at least three (more if needed) of the characteristics from amongst any of the four bases categories (e.g. one from demographic variables, one or two from psychographic variables, and one from behavioral variables, or a similar scheme). Be sure to explain your choices based on what customer need the product or service offering can fill for each segment.