Marketing Plan

This final assignment asks you to choose a product or a service. It can be a real one or it could be something entirely brand new.

Your Marketing Plan is an essential part of your overall Marketing Module. When you start a business or decide to introduce new products or concepts, your marketing plan will help you to assess customer needs and develop a suitable product or service, convey product or service features to your target audience (potential customers), establish distribution channels, determine the most effective ways to promote your product or service.

Furthermore, the Marketing Plan will help you to understand the concepts better; therefore, by working on it diligently, you can enhance your understanding of Marketing and its applications.

Content and Structure

In this assignment you should use the Marketing Principles. Some of the main areas which will help you to develop your marketing plan are: the S.W. O.T. analysis, Micro and Macro - environment analysis, Consumer Behaviour Characteristics, Pricing Concepts, Product Development Process - Product Life Cycle and the use of Marketing Communication tools.

Furthermore, questions you may ask yourself to help you in your reflection include:

What is the target market that will you be reaching?

What are your sales goals?

How will you differentiate from your competitors?

Essential information must be included in the body of the Marketing Plan and will be counted in the word count. Extra illustrative information may be included in the appendices.

Your essay will be assessed using the Writing Rubric located at the top of the course shell.

Your Marketing Plan should include some standard components that will help you to line up your marketing activities with your business goals following this Marketing Plan outline:

1. Executive Summary

Every Marketing Plan should begin with an executive Summary, which is basically a Summary about your company, your market and the main points of your marketing plan. This should include:

Company overview

Explanation of how your product/service is different (better) than those of your competitors.

2. Marketing Audit

Here in this section you should provide information about the company's current situation, about the market, product performance, competition and distribution.

Marketing Audit refers to the comprehensive, systematic, analysis, evaluation of a company's Marketing Assets.

3. SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis draws from the market audit. The process of SWOT analysis evaluates your company's Strengths, Weaknesses; market Opportunities and potential Threats in order to provide competitive insight into the potential and critical issues that impact the overall success of the business. You should begin the SWOT analysis by conducting a review of internal Strengths and Weakness in your company. After the company's internal analysis you need to evaluate the external opportunities and threats that may affect the company. You don't need to elaborate this section at this stage; bullet points may be the best way to start your analysis on these topics.

4. Objectives and Issues

In this next step you will be setting objectives for the marketing function and identifying issues that are already apparent or may become apparent as obstacles to achieving the objectives. The objectives are goals that the company would like to attain during the plan's term. Business objectives may centre on growth, maintenance or profitability; each of these drive different marketing objectives.

5. Marketing Strategy

In this section, you should focus on making sure that your products and services meet customer needs and developing long-term and profitable relationships with those customers. To achieve this, you will need to create a flexible strategy that can respond to changes in customer perceptions and demand. It may also help you identify whole new markets that you can successfully target.

6. Marketing Mix

Marketing Mix helps you define your marketing options in terms of Product, Place, Price and Promotion.

7. Marketing Implementation

Marketing Mix helps you to define your marketing options in terms of product, place, price and promotion.

Product: This is either a service or a good that the company offers to meet specific customer needs or demands.

The potential and target customers need to be identified and understood perfectly in order for the product to succeed.

Price: This is the amount the consumer is expected to pay in order to gain the Product/service.

Place: Here you should explain how the product would be available to the end consumer. A key element of placement is distribution of the product.

Promotion: This involves all the marketing techniques and strategies out there. These include sales promotions, advertising, public relations, special offers etc. Every marketing channel used needs to be suitable for the product, the price of the product as well as the consumer the product is being marketed to.

8. Implementation of the plan

It is the process of executing the marketing strategy by creating specific actions that will ensure that the marketing objectives are achieved.

Good implementation is critical to the overall success of the organization.

9. Marketing Budgets

This component of a marketing plan consists of developing a marketing budget, which will allow you to plan for marketing expenditures.

10. Control

Marketing control is the process of monitoring the proposed plans as they proceed and adjusting where necessary.

The word count is 3000 words +/- 10%. This does not include the reference

list and any appendices the assignment may include.

Accurate referencing of sources is crucial in this coursework. The referencing

system used on this module is the APA Reference system. Please make sure you are familiar with this. Marks will be deducted for inaccurate referencing