Reference no: EM132068053

MARKETING PLAN

A Marketing Plan provides a vision and strategy proposal to position a business or product or service in the marketplace. The right marketing plan identifies who the target customers are, how to reach them, what strategies to use, and how to retain your customers over time. This assessment involves the preparation of a marketing plan based on the marketing activities of a selected company.

1. This is a project the marketing plan effectively needs to be developed throughout the semester. For the project, your group can choose any one of the local businesses (or a product or service of that business) from the following and identify a marketing challenge and/or opportunity of interest for the company.

1.) Destination NSW

2.) Victoria University- Sydney

3.) The Cupcake Factory

4.) Telecom companies (Optus or VodaFone)

5.) Actual Project

Under Actual Project, if you are working in an organization or have access to organization insights and resources and would prefer to undertake this piece of assessment on that organization you may do so. However, you will be required to have written permission from senior management within the organization. Please speak with the unit coordinator if you are planning to do any actual projects.

Time to time, we may also have actual projects from interested industry partners who would allow our student groups to gain hands on experience through developing strategies and solutions on projects of their own. The unit coordinator will notify you of any such available projects. Please speak with your unit coordinator if you know of any companies who would want to participate in such class projects.

2. The assessment is a group project and 3 to 4 students are allowed to form a single group. Ideally would be to have 3 members per group, but based on class size and special cases, the lecturer will have the final say for group formations. Groups and their preferred marketing plan companies will have to be finalized by week 3. Team members are expected to make equitable contribution to the completion of the report. Teams are strongly advised to contact the lecturer/tutor at the earliest for any major issues or concerns with the team members. Team conflicts should be mitigated between the group members as it is a part of the learning process. "Free-riders" will be dealt on a case by case basis and will have a negative impact on his/her assessment grade

3. There are various templates and models of marketing plan available in various textbooks, industry whitepapers, Internet resources, journal articles etc. Effectively they all cover the same core concepts and topics in various orders. To have a structured and unified guide for developing a marketing plan as well aligning the core topics of a plan with the unit contents and discussion, we will follow Chapter 17 from Dawn Iacobucci's text book which solely focuses on developing a Marketing Plan. Students are strongly advised to follow this chapter contents and the marketing plan guidelines and structures to complete this assessment task. The assessment evaluation and marking criteria will be based on the marketing plan framework discussed in the unit.

4. The following sections are required for the marketing plan. The detailed content and requirements of sections A, C, D, E and G are elaborated in Chapter 17 from Dawn Iacobucci's textbook. Groups can also utilize guidelines and strategies from textbooks, best practices and external resources to the complement the section requirements. The expected details for each of the sections will vary based on the nature of business, competitive environment, product/service strategy, availability of information and analytical capability of the group. Please review the mark weightings (in the evaluation criteria) assigned to each of the sections to construct your report accordingly.

Section	Guideline
A. Executive Summary	Review Chapter 17 for detailed guideline
B. Marketing Plan Objective	A rationale for the marketing plan, what it is about and what it hopes to achieve. The value proposition, purpose of study, alignment with company mission etc. to be discussed here.
C. Situation Analysis (5Cs)	Review Chapter 17 for detailed guideline
D. Market Analysis and Strategies (STP)	Review Chapter 17 for detailed guideline
E. Tactical Plans (4Ps)	Review Chapter 17 for detailed guideline
F. Conclusion
G. Appendices	Review Chapter 17 for detailed guideline