Final project paper

Each team will select/create a fictional product or service that they would like to bring to market. The students then become the class experts on the product, the company, and the industry in which it operates. Students should be encouraged to look up articles about that industry in Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Marketing Communications, Media-Scope, and/or Advertising Age.

Objectives: 

• Develop a five-year marketing plan for a fictional product or service that would be brought to market by an existing company.
• Understand course concepts by applying them through creating an original marketing plan.

Approach:

• It needs to be an existing business and not a business you plan on launching (pick an existing corporation. Please exclude Adidas, Amazon, Apple, Coca Cola, Google, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Nike, Tesla from your selection). Select a business you are interested in and one which you believe has an opportunity to improve its marketing strategy.

Requirements/Directions:

• Professional quality: Ask yourself if this will impress the client.

(Your client is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of the company).

• PowerPoint with narration. Envision your client as the audience for the presentation.
• By submitting this plan, it is understood that it may be published to turnitin.com, a website which checks for plagiarism. This is an original plan that your team creates on your own, not collaborating with other teams.

Section 1. Executive Summary

Write this last with highlights from the entire plan and main recommendations. It is a complete, yet concise summary. It should entice the executives to read the whole plan but also accomplish communicating all key points, just in case they only read this section.  It should be NO more than 1 typed page in length.

Section 2. Business Description

This should be a brief overview of the business and what products or services it offers and a short history of when the company was launched.

Section 3. Environmental Analysis

This section requires properly documented secondary literature to prove assertions. This section should be completed first as it will help you complete the rest. The Environmental Analysis should include three main areas:

1. Competitive Analysis

This involves defining the competitive space and includes sizing the market and identifying existing key competitors as well as emerging or potential competitors. Explain competitors’ history in the industry, their product and pricing strategies, target markets and customers, distribution channels, key marketing methods and strategies.

1. Porter’s five competitive forces that influence a company’s profitability:
2. Established competitors
3. Influential customers
4. Powerful suppliers
5. Emerging competitors (sometimes indirect)
6. Substitute product or service offerings

A solid understanding of these five forces enables you to understand what is influencing profitability in your industry, helps you uncover emerging trends, and helps you identify opportunities to work around competitive obstacles or influence them to your advantage.

1. SWOT Analysis (Internal Analysis and External Analysis):

Strengths and Weaknesses. These are internal to the company, so the company has more direct control over leveraging or improving them. Categories to consider include the current marketing mix, brand, human resource skills and processes, marketing processes, information technology infrastructure, and financial position.

Opportunities and Threats. These are external, such as competitive, environmental, legal and regulatory, etc.  Based on the analysis above, you need to complete the SWOT analysis with recommendations for the business to achieve a competitive advantage (alignment of strengths with market opportunities), countering the threats and potentially turning them into opportunities, and addressing the weaknesses. Try to bring the client a new perspective (based on facts) that they may be missing or have not yet implemented. Based on your recommendation in this section, you will develop specific marketing objectives in the next section.

Section 4. Marketing Objectives:

This section will take into account your competitive analysis, and the recommendations from the SWOT analysis, and translate them into actionable objectives. Be specific with measurable outcomes, e.g. “increase sales by 15% by x date” or “achieve sales of X in Year 1 and Y in Year 2” or “to achieve x% of customers making repeat purchases by x date’ or ‘increase market share of x product by y% by z date”. These objectives need to link back logically to your environmental analysis. This section should include an analysis of current marketing objectives and their performance. Objectives must be specific, measurable, and time-bound. Consider the timeframe to be the next 5 years.

Section 5. Marketing Strategy

Remember marketing strategy includes a target market and the marketing mix aligned with that target market. Be sure to pick at least one target market for the product you will introduce, each with its own defined mix that you recommend. This section needs to include the following main components:

1. Summarize the overall marketing strategy in a statement. This should also include a market positioning statement.
2. Recommended target market(s) must be justified with data sources including market size and include why it was chosen as the target as compared to other market segments and link this back to the Environmental Analysis.
3. All four components of the marketing mix programs supporting the target market(s) must be addressed individually and in alignment with the marketing objectives. You need to outline specific strategies for each of the four P’s.
   • Product (identify any changes needed for the product or service to satisfy the target market)
   • Pricing (which pricing strategy you are using; include competitive analysis)
   • Promotion (including, but not necessarily limited to only social media marketing)
   • Distribution (explain your channel strategy)

Section 6. Financial Analysis/Marketing Budget:

This section needs to include an estimate of the expenses to implement your recommendations and the expected return to the business. Include estimated cost to implement and a projection of quantified benefits they should expect.

Section 7. Marketing Implementation:

This section is the plan for implementing the marketing strategies for this new product that your team has recommended. Up until this point, you have made recommendations, defined time-bound objectives, and quantified the benefits. Prepare a realistic schedule by listing the tactical actions and plotting them onto a timeline; what is needed to complete the actions in order to achieve the objective. Indicate actions by quarter or month, depending on the business, but they must span an entire year.

Section 8. Evaluation/Control/Contingency:

How will you know if you are successful or if the plan needs adjusting? Feedback mechanisms? How will you measure your performance against objectives? Specifically indicate how your company should measure the marketing objectives outlined in Section 4 and how they should provide feedback to improve the plan.  Please include three to five foreseeable risks associated with your plan and your plan B for mitigating these issues.  Potential risks can fall under a number of categories including but not limited to financial, organizational, marketing, management, legal or regulatory, etc.