Project 4: Developing and Implementing a Marketing Plan Start Here

Introduction

In this project, your client has tasked your team with creating a marketing plan with the goal of increasing sales to other businesses in the United States. This project has been broken down into several smaller tasks in the steps below:

Step 1: Prepare for Group Work Step 2: Review Information on Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing Step 3: Understand the Components of a Marketing Plan and Research Guidelines Step 4: Prepare a Situation Analysis Report Step 5: Conduct an Environmental Scan Step 6: Research and Analyze the Company’s US Market Step 7: Develop Marketing Objectives Step 8: Conduct a Segmenting and Targeting of the US Market and Product Positioning (STP) Step 9: Develop a Marketing Strategy Step 10: Complete Financial Analysis and Implementation, Controls, and Contingency Plan Step 11: Complete and Submit Your Marketing Plan Step 12: Complete Skills Gap Analysis Step 13: Submit Your Work

Each task will help you create one piece of a complete marketing plan. You will have three weeks, so you should complete the 13 steps of this project by the end of Week 10. If you have any questions, please ask your instructor.

During this project, please submit your individual contribution to the team effort for the instructor to see. Lack of participation on this project as defined in your team agreement may affect your grade.

 

Step 1: Prepare for Group Work

he business-development team has convened, and you begin working with a talented group of colleagues. To efficiently and effectively address the task at hand, you first need to complete the team agreement and project work plan. This is especially important because your business-development team is a new group of specialists that has never before worked together, and the members are living and working in different geographic locations with different time zones. The team should submit the team agreement and project work plan to their study group as one submission, early in Week 2 of the course.

Step 2: Review Information on Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing

INBOX: 1 New Message

Subject:  Case Primer for Marketing Plan From:      Jillian Best, CEO, MCS To:           You As you have learned through your work with MCS clients, marketing is one of the most important functional areas in business. As you get oriented with the realities of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, I’d like you to do some more reading on two main elements: (1) business buying behavior, and (2) strategic alliances.

Business buying behavior relates to how business customers and their suppliers explore different avenues to manage relationships and enhance efficiency and effectiveness. Fostering the right relationship with businesses is crucial for any holistic marketing plan. B2B relationships are affected by supply, complexity of supply, availability of alternatives, and supply-market dynamism.

In addition, our new client may consider forming strategic alliances  to expand its US operations. The twenty-first century has seen an increased use of long-term global strategic alliances among both producers and distribution companies. Organizations form these alliances in an effort to secure commercial advantage and eliminate waste from their distribution channels. They can be crucial to success.

Please review the information linked above before going any further. This is a big client and a tremendous opportunity for MCS. Let me know if any questions arise as you get oriented with your team.

Best,

Jillian

Step 3: Understand the Components of a Marketing Plan and Research Guidelines

The team’s marketing knowledge and data acquisition skills are crucial to the success of this project. Your team will collect and analyze the information necessary to develop a marketing plan for expanding the company’s operations within the United States.

Your final marketing plan will ultimately include a situation analysis, analyses of the client’s market, strategy, and financing, and an outline describing the measures to implement the plan. Use this marketing plan template to help you create your marketing plan.

Step 4: Prepare a Situation Analysis Report

INBOX: 1 New Message

Subject:  Company Case File & Questions to Consider From:      Jillian Best, CEO, MCS To:          Team Hi again. I wanted to provide you with the company case file and some pertinent questions for you to consider while you work on your B2B marketing plan.

As part of the preparation necessary to complete your business-to-business marketing plan, you and your team will need to do in-depth research on your client’s company, including its operations, global reach, and range of offerings.

By the end of Week 8, I need you to produce a situation analysis report explaining your team’s findings on the company. Be sure to include a value proposition, essentially the promise that is made to the customer, explaining the reason a customer purchases a product or uses a service (i.e., the value that a company delivers to its customers).

Start by reading the attached case file and be sure to consider the following questions while you do additional research:

· Where is the company headquartered?

· What are the company’s major products and/or services?

· What is the company’s annual revenue in dollars, and what is its annual production in units?

· Does the company own its own facilities or does it subcontract manufacturing to others?

· Who are the company’s major suppliers of raw materials or parts, and where are they located?

· What is the distribution of the company’s workforce by country?

· How does the company differentiate its offering in its highly competitive markets?

· Does the company have exclusive marketing or distribution agreements or partnerships?

· Who are the company’s major global and US customers?

· What benefits does the company offer to its customers?

· Who are the company’s major global and US competitors?

When developing your situation analysis, you should also understand the importance of vision and mission statements and then research the company’s own vision and mission statements.

Write a three-page document detailing the main findings of your research about your client, including its mission and vision statement. Submit your document to your team’s study group.

That’s it for now, Jillian

 

Attachments:

Company Case File

Step 5: Conduct an Environmental Scan

As a member of the business development team for this project, you use quantitative and qualitative market information to make important decisions and set the direction of the marketing plan. As you continue to work on your situation analysis report, your team will use the following tools to conduct an environmental scan, the foundation on which a solid marketing plan is built.

Tools for Environmental Scan

Company-Specific Analysis (internal)

· SWOT analysis—A SWOT analysis is a planning and brainstorming tool that helps a company evaluate its projects and formulate its business plans. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You will use this tool to identify and analyze the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses as well as its external opportunities and threats. The results of this analysis may help the company improve its business or forecast how a new product or service will perform (Harmon, 2016).

Industry, Market, and Customer Analysis (external)

· PESTEL analysis—A PESTEL analysis (sometimes called PEST analysis) enables the company to identify, analyze, and monitor the political, economic, social, technological, legal (including regulatory), and environmental factors that may affect its operations (Frue, 2017).

· Porter’s five forces analysis—Porter’s five forces analysis is a framework that can help the company understand the competitive forces at play in its industry. These forces may influence how economic value is divided among the company’s competitors in the industry (Porter, 2008).

References

Frue, K. (2017). Why do PEST analysis for your business? Retrieved from http://pestleanalysis.com/

Harmon, A. (2016). SWOT analysis. Salem Press Encyclopedia [online]. Retrieved from Research Starters, Ipswich, MA.

Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1), 78–93.

Research your industry and its market trends in the United States and identify market opportunities, threats, and the company’s major global competition. Then conduct the SWOT, PESTEL, and Porter’s five forces analyses on your client’s company. These tools should allow you to analyze the company’s internal environment, customers, and macro-environment (external environment), and to answer the following questions in your situation analysis report:

· Which elements have the biggest impact on the company’s success?

· What factors affect the company’s customers (other businesses)?

Deliverable: Your final situation analysis should include your three-page overview of your research findings and an eight-page review of your environmental scan. The completed situation analysis report should be eleven pages, excluding cover page, executive summary, the reference list, and appendices. Any tables, graphs, and figures should be included as appendices. Your report should have one-inch margins and be double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. The report should be organized using headings and subheadings to improve its readability.

Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMUC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.

By the end of Week 8, submit your situation analysis report to your team’s study group.

In the next step, you will start a market analysis report.

Step 6: Research and Analyze the Company’s US Market

Now that you have completed the environmental scan, your team needs to conduct a market analysis of the company’s customers in the United States. Outline how the team would conduct this analysis, while considering both current and potential customers. Your analysis should address how you would determine answers to the following questions:

· What needs are being met by the products or services that they purchase? What are the benefits to the customers? Make sure that you differentiate between features and benefits; go beyond manifest motives and consider latent motives.

· Who is involved in the purchase process? Who are influencers? Who are buyers? Who are users?

· How do customers pay? Describe payment plans, financing, banking arrangements, etc.

· Where are the products or services sold and delivered, and what are the distribution channels?

· How often are the different types of the products or services purchased? Is there seasonality to sales?

· Is there any market regulation? Is there self-regulation? Do any federal or state regulations affect the company’s US operations?

· What is the size of the market (in dollars and units)? What is the growth rate of that market?

Deliverable: Present your results to the CEO in a market analysis report of five pages, excluding cover page, executive summary, the reference list, and appendices. Any tables, graphs, and figures should be included as appendices. Your report should have one-inch margins and be double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. The report should be organized using headings and subheadings to improve its readability.

Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMUC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.

By the end of Week 9, submit your market analysis report to your Study group. Then proceed to the next step, where you will decide on marketing objectives for your client.

Step 7: Develop Marketing Objectives

The next component of the marketing plan your team needs to tackle is the strategic analysis report.

As a marketing team, you need to decide on the marketing objectives for your target market before you develop your company’s marketing strategy. Marketing objectives translate the company’s mission and business into long- and short-term goals. Marketing objectives are usually quantitative and include sales (both in units or dollars), market share, and profitability. They may also include qualitative factors such as quality, customer satisfaction, and social responsibility (Kerin & Hartley, 2017). Knowing exactly where you want to go is essential in deciding how to get there. The objectives have to be measurable, specific, and have a set time limit.

Be careful not to have too many objectives, since a limited number of objectives will help you focus. The objectives should be challenging but achievable.

Prepare a one-page document outlining your marketing objectives. This will ultimately form part of your strategic analysis report. Submit your document to your team’s study group.

You will continue your work on a strategic analysis report in the next step, where you will begin to examine your market and determine how the company can meet the marketing objectives you identified.

Step 8: Conduct a Segmenting and Targeting of the US Market and Product Positioning (STP)

The next step in developing your strategic analysis report involves segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP).

Take Note

· Segmenting refers to breaking the market down into homogenous groups.

· Targeting refers to selecting the customer group or groups that you will focus your marketing efforts on. The appropriate segmentation variable is dependent on the needs and wants of customers.

· These decisions are directly tied to your  value proposition  and require extensive marketing research on the customers. Once the segmentation variable is determined and the target markets selected, you need to develop a positioning strategy, which refers to the way you want the customer to view the product or service relative to the competition.

Describe the market research you would conduct to analyze and segment the US market. Explain how you would select your target markets and explain the process of positioning the company’s products or services relative to the competition.

Detail your STP in a four-page document. This will ultimately form part of your strategic analysis report. Submit your document to your team’s study group.

Your overall STP is important, because it will create a foundation for the refinements you will make in the next step, where you will compete and submit your strategic analysis report.

Step 9: Develop a Marketing Strategy

You and your team have been working around the clock to generate all the pieces for your new client’s requests. Jillian touches base to see how things are moving along and to provide additional instruction.

INBOX: 1 New Message

Subject:  Pulling it all together From:      Jillian Best, CEO, MCS To:          Team & You Hi Team, Please develop a marketing strategy for this client based on your STP strategy. The following marketing strategy elements are interdependent and are crucial components of a successful marketing plan. Click each component for more in-depth information:

· branding strategies—Describe the needs and wants of your target customers and how you intend to position the offerings versus the competition. Present a detailed description of the different types of products or services that you intend to sell in the US market, including their attributes, features, and quality level, along with the brand names, intended packaging, logo, and supplemental products and services. As you make these branding strategy decisions, it is imperative that you stay focused on the customer. Remember that the company’s customers do not buy features; they buy benefits, both tangible and intangible. It is also critical to understand the customer: think about who makes the purchase and who influences that decision.

· pricing strategy—Pricing is very strategic, as it is the only marketing mix variable that generates income. As a marketing team, you need to decide on your price objectives and strategies. Think about pricing tactics like discounts and incentives. You need to decide whether your pricing strategy should be skimming, premium, or market penetration given the nature of the offerings, your customers, and your major competition. Profit margins and breakeven analysis will also need to be considered. As you determine your final price points, you’ll need to consider the perceived value of your offerings. Describe how you would go about making these decisions as well as the major issues involved.

· distribution and supply chain strategy—Is it easy to transport your offerings, or are there issues involved in delivering them to the final user? These strategic decisions deal with how customers purchase your products or services. Will you market your products or services directly to your customers or through intermediaries like distributors and wholesalers? Will you follow an exclusive, selective, or intensive distribution? Distribution decisions focus on marketing channels as well as the physical distribution of the offerings. Explain the criteria you would use to make these distribution and supply chain strategy decisions.

· integrated marketing communications—This is often the most visible element of a marketing strategy. The company’s communication strategy involves developing an integrative mix of a number of different tools, while keeping in mind the needs and characteristics of the target market. These tools may include a mix of traditional communication elements such as advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity and public relations. It is essential that your promotion objectives are clearly defined, and that a holistic and integrated marketing communication approach is used.

Whew, that was a lot to cover, but all important info,

Jillian

 

Deliverable: Your final strategic analysis report should include your one-page outline of marketing objectives, your four-page STP analysis, and a five-page marketing strategy. As follows, the final strategic analysis report should be 10 pages, excluding cover page, executive summary, the reference list, and appendices. Any tables, graphs, and figures should be included as appendices. Your report should have one-inch margins and be double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. The report should be organized using headings and subheadings to improve its readability.

Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMUC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.

Early in Week 10, submit your strategic analysis report your team’s study group.

Your team will prepare a financial analysis next.

Step 10: Complete Financial Analysis and Implementation, Controls, and Contingency Plan

The final component of your marketing plan is a financial analysis report that also includes a schedule for implementation, any needed control measures, and a contingency plan. Present your financial analysis in a table that includes the following details about your client:

· forecasted total number of units sold (for a service industry, products could be service contracts or the number of customers served)

· forecasted average unit price (AUP)

· forecasted total sales (in US dollars)

· forecasted average unit variable cost

· forecasted fixed cost

· breakeven point (units)

· breakeven point (in US dollars)

Read about breakeven analysis  to assist your calculations. In addition, use the following guidelines as you develop your implementation, controls, and contingency plan:

1. Decide on the team that is going to implement the plan.

2. Determine the time frame for implementation.

3. Secure the financial and human resources needed.

4. Distribute the tasks among team members.

5. Periodically check and communicate performance against the marketing plan metrics (benchmarks) to ensure that implementation is on track.

6. Make changes if there are any deviations from the key performance indicators (KPIs) for those metrics, preferably using a dashboard. KPIs may include the number of sales calls, the number of new customers, sales, profitability, growth, etc.

7. Contingency plans should deal with severe deviations from productions plans, sales figures, market share, profitability, changes in government regulations (e.g., increased taxation), and drastic competitors’ moves (e.g., launching a competing product or service or an offering that may render your offering obsolete or less attractive to the market).

Deliverable: Submit a report that explains your financial analysis. Also, include a table at the end of the report that highlights your financials. In addition, explain your schedule for implementation as well as the controls you intend to put in place and how you intend to proceed when your benchmarks are not met (contingency plan).

Your financial analysis and implementation report should be three pages, excluding cover page, the reference list, and appendices. Any tables, graphs, and figures should be included as appendices. Your report should have one-inch margins and be double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. The report should be organized using headings and subheadings to improve its readability.

Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMUC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.

Early in Week 10, submit your financial analysis and implementation, controls, and contingency plan to your team’s study group.

In the next step, you will combine the work from all of your analyses to create your final marketing plan.

Step 11: Complete and Submit Your Marketing Plan

Combine your situation analysis, market analysis, strategic analysis, and financial and implementation analysis into one complete paper following the marketing plan template. Edit the document to ensure that there is clear flow of ideas from one section to another. In addition, prepare a one-page executive summary that highlights the most important aspects of your marketing plan. The paper should be 30–32 pages, excluding cover page, executive summary, the reference list, and appendices. Any tables, graphs, and figures should be included as appendices. Your report should have one-inch margins and be double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. The report should be organized using headings and subheadings to improve its readability.

Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMUC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.

By the end of Week 10, submit your final marketing plan to the dropbox located in the final step of this project.

 

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