Assignment 1: Simplified Marketing Yourself Plan for Personal/Professional Branding
"Brand image exists in the minds of the audience members. It's the marketer's job to shape that image accordingly."
Typical marketing plans require marketers to assess their own sets of resources, evaluate the marketplace, determine their target market(s), and then create a set of reasonable objectives (goals) with an accompanying set of appropriate strategies and tactics to reach those objectives.
For this assignment, you will create a simplified marketing plan for your own personal and/or professional brand, i.e., "Brand You." This could in itself be a daunting task, but fortunately, most of this has already been completed by you for you in previous class assignments.
Your Simplified Personal/Professional Marketing Plan must include the following elements:
1. Plan introduction and duration. This is a brief introduction to the purpose of the plan, including the duration of its scope (1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc.). The duration must be for at least one year.
2. Summary/synthesis of your personal raw materials. (This was accomplished as part of your Raw Materials Assessment.) Summarize and synthesize your personal raw materials in a manner that allows a reader to understand the opportunities and challenges that may face you as you construct and develop "Brand You."
3. Market segment(s) that are to be targeted. (This was accomplished if you completed the Product/Audience Match assigned earlier in the semester.) This section should include any relevant portions from your Product/Audience Match Strategy assignment that would apply to this particular marketing plan:
a) The potential target markets for your personal/professional brand (from "Part 1: List Current Audiences" and "Part 4: List Prospective Audiences").
b) Why these audiences are being targeted (from "Part 2: Importance of Current Audiences" and "Part 5: Importance of Prospective Audiences").
c) What the people in those segments desire in a person, employee, boss, etc.; that is, the attributes of the ideal candidate to be courted by that market segment (from "Part 3: What Current Audiences Want from You" and "Part 6: What Prospective Audiences Want from You").
NOTE: Even though you will only mention in this document the target segments that are applicable to this marketing plan, you must still include the COMPLETE Product/Audience Match Strategy assignment as an Appendix to this assignment.
4. Objectives/Goals for your brand. (Much of this was accomplished if you completed the Personal Marketing Strategy assigned earlier in the semester.) List at least five clearly identified goals that have a measurable component and a time (deadline) component. Delineate how each goal will be measured to ensure, eventually, that it has (or has not) been accomplished. You can have multiple-level objectives and combine this section with multiple-level strategies from the next section if desired. The key is that all objectives must lead you to your overall goal of winning the hearts of your target audience(s).
NOTE: Even though you will only mention in this document any objectives/strategies that you feel are relevant to this marketing plan, you must still include the COMPLETE Personal Marketing Strategy assignment as an Appendix to this assignment.
5. Strategies and tactics designed to reach the objectives. (Much of this was accomplished if you completed the Personal Marketing Strategy assigned earlier in the semester.) Your strategies should have direct-line connections to the objectives they are designed to reach. As mentioned above (in Part 4), you can combine this section with the Objectives or leave it as a separate section. In either case, you must include a one-page figure/chart/image that depicts how the strategies and objectives are connected.
6. Marketing Plan Timeline. Create a timeline for your plan where you detail the start and end dates for each strategy and tactic. You must include a one-page figure/chart/image of the timeline. You can be as creative as you like to create the timeline.
Assignment 2: Product/Audience Match Strategy
As explained in the PDF reading "Matching the Product with the Audience When Marketing Yourself," it's critical to understand your product (i.e., your skills, attributes, personality, core values, etc.) and to determine and understand your target audiences (i.e., potential employers, colleagues, customers, career gatekeepers, etc.).
For this assignment, you'll work to outline your potential target audiences, determine what those audiences desire, and then decide how you'll match your product with your target audiences. Using either a paragraph, outline, or table format, do the following:
1. List Current Audiences. List various audiences (at least 8) to whom you currently market yourself on a daily, weekly, or other periodic basis. These might include potential employers, current employers, friends, family, teachers, various societal segments, social groups, customers, colleagues, employees, store personnel, vendors/suppliers, social media audiences, etc. Don't forget that these audiences might be face-to-face, online, over the phone, etc. For each audience, be extremely specific as to who this audience is. Don't just say "store employees" when you can say "the early morning employees at the Starbucks that I go to every weekday." Don't just say "my co-workers" when you can say "my co-workers Cristina, Derek, and Victoria who work in the cubicles next to mine."
2. Importance of Current Audiences. For each of the 8+ current audiences, provide some insights as to why each particular audience might be important to you in your marketing yourself efforts. How can impressing each particular audience help you?
3. What Current Audiences Want From You. Finally, for each of the 8+ current audiences you listed, write down at least three characteristics (features, attributes, skills, traits, values, etc.) that they would desire in a person such as you. Although there may be some similar traits or characteristics across the audiences you listed, each audience likely will desire some unique characteristics as well.
4. List Prospective Audiences. Your next step is to add at least three new "prospective" target audiences to whom you would like to market yourself in the near or distant future. Again, they can be potential employers in a particular industry, friends, social groups, customers, fans, readers, etc. While it's good to be specific as to the industry, type of people, etc., you don't have to be as specific as you were in Step 1 because you may not know the details of these audiences yet.
5. Importance of Prospective Audiences. As you did in Step 2 with your "current" audiences, for each of the 3+ "prospective" audiences, provide some insights as to why each particular audience might be important to you in your future marketing yourself efforts. How can impressing each particular audience help you?
6. What Prospective Audiences Want From You. For each of the 3+ "prospective" target audiences, write down at least three characteristics (features, attributes, skills, traits, values, etc.) that they would desire in a person such as you. Because you may not really know these audiences very well, you may end up estimating this section more than the other ones. Nevertheless, consider what characteristics would be important to each audience.
7. Product/Audience Match. Now consider how well you're matching your Product You with the desired attributes of the (at least 8) current audiences and the (at least 3) prospective audiences that you listed. Discuss the matches as well as the discrepancies (the instances in which you don't match).
8. Changing Product You. Discuss what you can do to have a better match between your various target audiences and the product (set of attributes, traits, etc.) that you're offering. How can you change your Product You as well as your Personal/Professional Brand to better market yourself to these various audiences? In essence, this section consists of a set of self-improvement recommendations.
After conducting this exercise, write up your results using the following guide:
1. Cover Page: Name, Panther ID, Major, Minor, Certificate(s), Assignment Title
2. Introduction: Discuss the purpose for a Product/Audience Match.
3. Product/Audience Match Analysis: This is where you'll put the analysis from the eight steps above.
4. Synthesis and Summary: Discuss what you learned from this exercise. What did you learn about target marketing? What did you learn about your own audiences? What did you learn about yourself? Synthesize your learning from the various parts of the assignment and create a summary that you can review in the future.
Assignment 3: Personal Marketing Strategy
When marketing a product, brand, or organization, marketers must always consider the need to continuously improve their product offerings in order to elevate, or even just maintain, their position in the marketplace. Such a continuous improvement process starts with understanding where you currently are in the marketplace (i.e., how your product is perceived in comparison to other products) and what is desired by your target audiences. At that point you have the challenge to choose which goals to set and how you'll try to reach them.
If you've completed the assignments thus far, you've already evaluated Product You with your Raw Materials Assessment. You also have assessed your target audiences with the Product/Audience Match Strategy. Now it's time to set strategic goals and contemplate the actions to reach those goals.
Setting goals is a difficult process, mainly because there are so many options available to you. Your personal and professional branding options are not limited to a mere fork in the road with two choices (à la Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"). It's more like hundreds (or even thousands) of choices if you really open up your thinking about what your future could hold.
Thus, this assignment will require some degree of self-reflection to determine where you would like to move your personal brand and/or professional brand over the next one to five years.
Self-Reflection, Objectives, and Strategies
The best way to start this particular goal-setting process is to consider the values you assessed in your Raw Materials Inventory. If your aspirations for your personal brand and professional brand are developed with your values in mind, you'll be more likely to feel motivated to work to achieve them, and you'll be more likely to be satisfied when those goals are reached.
The next step is to consider how you would like to be perceived by others as you develop your brand. What would you like people to think about you a year from now? Two years from now? Five or ten years from now? What type of brand would you like to develop? As you consider these questions, keep in mind the idea that you want to change not only the "perception" of your brand, but also the underlying "reality" of that brand. For example, if you want to be perceived as being an expert in mobile marketing, then develop your knowledge and skills pertaining to mobile marketing and then market that expertise. Always remember that the best way to be perceived as an expert in a particular area is to truly become an expert in that area.
Once you start to have general ideas or goals of what you want for your brand, set specific objectives with those ideas in mind. Remember to use the SMART method (as explained in one of the assigned videos for this module) to set useful objectives.
Finally, list some strategies, tactics, or actions that will help you reach your objectives. The more descriptive you are when listing the strategies (as well as the objectives), the more likely you'll be to complete them.
Specific Assignment Elements
After you have completed the above steps, create a document as follows:
1. Cover Page: Name, Panther ID, Major, Minor, Certificate(s), Assignment Title
2. Introduction: Discuss the purpose for having a personal marketing strategy.
3. General Branding Goals: Discuss your brand aspirations for one, two, five and/or ten years from now. Describe how you will want people to perceive you.
4. Specific Branding Objectives: Using the SMART goals method, write at least 5 clear and achievable objectives that align with your general branding goals.
5. Strategies/Tactics: To reach your objectives, you'll need specific strategies or tasks that clearly lead to those objectives. Discuss the strategies or tactics that will help you reach the objectives that you listed in Part 4. Have at least two strategies/tactics for each objective.
6. Synthesis/Summary: Summarize your personal market strategy, and provide a synthesis of how the pieces fit together.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.