$$ Question: Your goal: To begin drafting a creative and practical marketing plan, including a mission statement, SWOT analysis, marketing objectives, and an analysis of the marketing environment. You$$ll also consider the role of social responsibility and ethics in your marketing plan. This is your opportunity to play the role of marketing manager and gain valuable,

Your goal: To begin drafting a creative and practical marketing plan, including a mission statement, SWOT analysis, marketing objectives, and an analysis of the marketing environment. You$$ll also consider the role of social responsibility and ethics in your marketing plan.

This is your opportunity to play the role of marketing manager and gain valuable, first$-$hand experience in writing, organizing, and polishing a marketing plan.

Over the course of six assignments, you$$ll apply what you$$re learning about marketing and make decisions about either an existing product $($a good or a service$),$ a new product to be launched, or a product or company suggested by your instructor.

The point of this project is to create a single marketing document for use in communicating a clear marketing vision to guide decisions, clarifying objectives and priorities, delineating marketing activities, and monitoring and evaluating marketing performance. As you move from one assignment to the next, you may find yourself returning to earlier answers and adding or revising as new or different ideas occur to you. Save all of your answers and notes, so you can refresh your memory throughout the project.

If you$$re making decisions about an existing product, choose one that$$s well known so you can research the product$$s competition, features and benefits, customers, distribution, promotion, and pricing. If your marketing plan is about a product that doesn$$t exist yet, consider whether anything like it is already being marketed, who buys that type of product, and the competition in that industry. If your instructor assigns you to write a plan for a particular product or company, do your homework to understand the background before you begin the first assignment.

You won$$t be writing your marketing plan in the same order as your readers will see it$.$ Why not? Because the $$Executive Summary$$ appears first in the plan, but you can$$t sum up your ideas until you$$ve written everything else. So the summary is the last section you$$ll write, after you$$ve thought about implementation and performance evaluation. At the bottom of this page you'll find a simple Marketing Plan template that you can download and use to help organize your work as you build a complete plan. Now get ready for your first assignment as a marketing manager preparing a marketing plan.

$1.$ In the spaces provided below, start by briefly describing the good or service you$$re marketing, why your product is needed, and the customers who are likely to buy it$.$ Also sketch out the company$$s situation and what you want to accomplish with this marketing plan. Save these answers and be prepared to refine your notes into two paragraphs later in this project. In the final assignment, your overview will become part of the Executive Summary.

a$.$ The product is: $($such as a highly durable mountain bike, a nutritious and tasty snack product, or a scanning service for digitizing fragile photos$)$

b$.$ Why the product is needed: $($such as needing a sturdier bike for rocky terrain, needing a snack that$$s healthy and convenient, or needing a way to save old photographs by scanning them$)$

c$.$ The customers for this product are likely to be: $($such as mountain$-$biking enthusiasts, parents buying snacks for children, or people who want to digitally preserve fragile family photos$)$

d$.$ In a few sentences, the company$$s situation and the purpose of this marketing plan are: $($such as: a startup company preparing to launch an innovative new product; a division of a major corporation putting more marketing support behind a particular product; or an international company planning to introduce a product in the United States$)$

$2.$ Stakeholders are people $($individuals and groups$)$ who have a $$stake$$ in some aspect of your product, operations, markets, industry, and outcomes. Customers are stakeholders, as are employees. What other groups might be important to the success of your marketing plan? Identify two other stakeholder groups with whom you will aim to build a positive, long$-$term relationship. Write about these stakeholder relationships in $2-3$ sentences.

$3.$ The mission statement represents a long$-$term vision for the organization, identifying its purpose, and who it exists to serve. The mission is important because it serves as a foundation for strategy at multiple levels, as well as for marketing mix elements. In $2-3$ sentences, state the mission of the business behind the product being marketed, and explain what the mission means for customers and other stakeholders.