This assignment takes the form of a written exercise. As such, it calls upon you to apply the marketing knowledge and skills you have developed to date to do a detailed Marketing Plan for a real product.
1.0 Assignment Format
(i) Your work must be presented in a business report format. This means structuring the content within it by using appropriate headings and sub-headings as well as having a coversheet with title, names of authors and date, plus a structured table of contents with corresponding page numbers. Detailed pages of numerical data should be put in a separate appendix (or appendices if more than one needed) with a title and number for each appendix.
(ii) All sources used in compiling your report must be fully acknowledged and referenced using the Harvard style. Failure to do this will incur penalties and will ultimately affect your mark for the assignment.
(iii) As some of the marks for this exercise are awarded for presentation and communication, it is important that your work is written in correct, formal English (this also means using correct punctuation and spelling). Ensure your work is thoroughly proofread before submission so that you do not lose marks for poor presentation.
2.0 Plagiarism
You should not under any circumstances copy material from secondary/literature sources and attempt to pass it off as your own. All material of this nature must be fully acknowledged and referenced correctly
Word length
3,000 words (maximum), excluding graphs/tables/appendices.
Details about the Marketing Plan
6.1 The UK Market
The UK market is a largely mature, established market for most sectors, it also can be a very large, “crowded” and dynamic market where changes are constantly occurring – some brands seem to last forever while others come and go, seemingly reflecting the changing habits and preferences of consumers, whose purchasing and usage behaviour have become increasingly difficult to track and predict.
6.2 Your Task
For this assignment, you will need to pick a product that is currently sold in the UK. This should be a branded product. Make sure that you choose a product and not a service. Services are intangible processes that are consumed as they are created; products are physical goods that are consumed after they have been created. If unsure, think whether you can drop what you think is a product on your foot. If it cannot be dropped, it is a service. For example, air travel (airlines) is a service. An airplane is a product that can be dropped on your foot.
You need to make clear which product you have chosen in your executive summary. You are recommended to choose a product sold in a B2C market, rather than a B2B one, as this would make market segmentation easier for you.
You will need to produce the strategic Marketing Plan for your chosen product. Please see the required contents below.
6.3 Required Contents
Your Marketing plan should include the following sections:
• An executive summary outlining the main findings of your analysis/recommendations. This should not be over a page, preferably even less than this.
• A brief overview of the UK market for all products from your chosen product category (e.g. a UK market for chocolate). You may wish to include some recent trends in this market.
• A detailed market analysis. This should include the following:
o segments in the market. You should estimate the size of each market segment. You may use the exercise from Lecture 1 in this module to help you perform market segmentation. Make sure that you can explain how you arrive at your estimates.
o the chosen branded product’s current performance against the main competitors in one of the segments. Explain why you chose this particular segment for analysis. I recommend that you keep to one segment ONLY for the purposes of this report; however, if you are sure that you can stay within the word limit, feel free to choose more than one segment.
• Marketing objectives in your chosen segment(s) for your chosen product for the next three years. Make sure that these make sense.
• One or two aspects of marketing strategies for this segment.
The word limit for this assignment is 3,000 words, excluding the references, tables and figures. This is well below what a real-life marketing plan should be, therefore your Strategic Marketing Plan should be limited to one product market, one segment and should end at marketing strategies. You do not need to reflect on how the plan will be implemented, budgeted etc.
You are welcome to use any additional theory/concept you would like in your Marketing Plan. These will count towards the quality of analysis if used correctly.
6.4 Searching for Information
It is expected that you will consult a considerable variety of information sources. This is because you will not find all relevant information in one convenient source (that is the nature of market information!). It is also quite possible that you will not be able to find everything that you would ideally like in order to conduct a comprehensive analysis, but you will at least need to try and provide evidence that you have done so! (This is not uncommon in business, but managers still have to make decisions, even if the information is not perfect – there are often information gaps).
You should use the electronic databases available online through the university library resources to conduct your search, as well as other search engines such as Google. You are not expected to purchase material which is only commercially available. Useful information sources will not only take the form of market reports but also features or short articles in magazines such as Marketing Week or Campaign (accessible via Library Resources) and industry trade journals.
In addition to secondary research, you will pick up many useful hints by actually going to see your brand on display (i.e. not just looking on-line but in physical stores) at one or two points of sale – this should give some clues as to its positioning, which products it may be competing with and its relative price point in the marketplace.
6.5 Other Information
You are highly recommended to start working on your Marketing Plan from week 2. You will see that the lectures and tutorials give you specific, practical knowledge that can be put into your marketing plan.
You are also recommended to ask your tutors specific questions related to the Marketing Plan in tutorials. The sooner you do it, the clearer it will be to you how to produce a good report.
