Marketing assignment question 1

Assignment Questions:

In your assumed role as a Marketing Consultant for a stated client organization of your choice, you are required to submit a management report to the Managing Director to address the need for changes to the current marketing strategy.

Your brief should be achieved through the following requirements : -

1. A critical assessment of the current internal organisational environment [10 marks] and the external market environment which have a direct impact upon the

performance of the marketing function

[Key findings and practical conclusions should be presented in the form of a SWOT Analysis. In addition key operational constraints which limit marketing performance should be highlighted.]

2. The existing market segmentation, market targeting and competitive [20 marks] positioning, with recommendations for change to improve future market relevance for business sustainability.

[ You will be required to state where the organization is now and how the projected position should be for future business sustainability. Each of the 3

areas of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning must be addressed. ]

3. For one core market segment, explain the current buying behaviour and [20 marks] the environmental factors which may influence buying patterns in the future. State how the company should take justified pro-active steps to meet changes in buying behaviour.

[A model of buying behaviour should be used to capture current purchasing patterns. Sources of Environmental Influences such as emerging trends, technology innovation, competition and the PESTEL factors should be used as a source of reference. The suggested steps should be aligned to the need for change. ]

4. Undertake Product Life Cycle Analysis and examine the need for [20 marks] innovation within selected marketing mix variables to secure forecasted business volumes across all market segments.

[ This requires an action plan for change for each of the relevant marketing mix variables, timescales and forecasts. The use of models may be appropriate to add depth and rationale. Attempt to cross-reference your suggestions to earlier sections in this report. ]

5. Using the Ansoff Matrix as a framework, show how your marketing [10 marks] performance targets will be achieved through these broadly based, risks assessed, marketing strategies for the next 3 years.

[Market Penetration, Market Development, Product/Service Development and Diversification Strategy options should be used as appropriate with timescales applied to sales and profit contribution targets. Risk assessment is required for each of the Ansoff strategies adopted. ]

6. Develop a Digital marketing plan so that the existing customer experience [20 marks] could be improved to attract new customers as well as to drive customer loyalty among existing customers?

[ View the customer experience pre-sale, sale and post-sale, consider all the customer contact points throughout this sales process. Highlight areas of weaknesses in the total customer experience process and then make appropriate recommendations to support customer acquisition and customer retention. ]

Assessment Requirements:

• The submission of your work assessment should be organized and clearly structured in a report format.

• Maximum word length allowed is 4000 words, excluding words in charts & tables and in the appendixes section of your assignment.

• This assignment is worth 100% of the final assessment of the module.

• Student is required to submit a type-written document in Microsoft Wordformat with Times New Roman font type, size 12 and line spacing 1.5.

• Indicate the sources of information and literature review by including all the necessary citations and references adopting the Harvard Referencing System.

• Students who have been found to have committed acts of Plagiarism are automatically considered to have failed the entire semester. If found to have breached the regulation for the second time, you will be asked to leave the course.

• Plagiarism involves taking someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas or essays from online essay banks and trying to pass them off as your own. It is a form of cheating which is taken very seriously.

Marking Criteria

Notes on Plagiarism & Harvard Referencing

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is passing off the work of others as your own. This constitutes academic theft and is a serious matter which is penalized in assignment marking.

Plagiarism is the submission of an item of assessment containing elements of work produced by another person(s) in such a way that it could be assumed to be the student’s own work. Examples of plagiarism are:

• the verbatim copying of another person’s work without acknowledgement
• the close paraphrasing of another person’s work by simply changing a few words or altering the order of presentation without acknowledgement
• the unacknowledged quotation of phrases from another person’s work and/or the presentation of another person’s idea(s) as one’s own.

Copying or close paraphrasing with occasional acknowledgement of the source may also be deemed to be plagiarism is the absence of quotation marks implies that the phraseology is the student’s own.

Plagiarised work may belong to another student or be from a published source such as a book, report, journal or material available on the internet.

Harvard Referencing

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author’s surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near the top of this article.

• The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author’s surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say : “Jones (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery.”

• Two or three authors are cited using “and” or “&” : (Deane, Smith, and Jones, 1991) or (Deane, Smith & Jones, 1991). More than three authors are cited using et al. (Deane et al. 1992).

• An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx [1867] 1967, p. 90).

• If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.

• A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.

• Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as “Works cited” or “References”. The difference between a “works cited” or “references” list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.

• All citations are in the same font as the main text.

Examples

Examples of book references are :

• Smith, J. (2005a). Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research Foundation.
• Smith, J. (2005b). Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.

In giving the city of publication, an internationally well-known city (such as London, The Hague, or New York) is referenced as the city alone. If the city is not internationally well known, the country (or state and country if in the U.S.) are given.

An example of a journal reference:

• Smith, John Maynard. “The origin of altruism,” Nature 393, 1998, pp. 63940.

An example of a journal reference:

• Bowcott, Owen. “Street Protest”, The Guardian, October 18, 2005, accessed February 7, 2006.