The Task:
Gap 360 is pleased with the progress made to date. The company aim is to become the UK market leader in gap year travel in terms of customer satisfaction, passenger numbers, destinations and types of trips offered within 5 years of launch, therefore effectively by December 2016. They have employed your Direct and Digital Marketing Agency to ensure that they achieve this. In addition to the other factors, they believe that they will need to grow bookings to 11,000 per annum by 2016 in order to make this claim. This should include some repeat bookings which are not yet a major feature because they have only been in existence a relatively short time. However they believe that the reduction in the duration of many of the gap year trips creates an opportunity for repeat bookings and are looking to grow repeat sales to be 10% of total bookings.
A budget of £300,000 has been allocated for 2014, budget for future years is to be agreed subject to acceptance of the plan.
Your task is to produce a three year marketing communication plan for Gap 360 which will deliver this aim. Your plan should include:
- A Situation Analysis and summary of the Key Issues facing Gap 360 in their bid to become UK market leaders
- An overall communication plan covering the period January 2014 to December 2016 with a timeline that includes SMART objectives, forecast bookings for each year and projected budget requirements for 2015 and 2016.
- Your targeting and data strategy
- A detailed activity plan for 2014 and initial recommendations for 2015 and 2016; including your test programme and details of the measurements you will put in place in order to support the claim for being UK market leader.
- Creative proposals outlining what the key messages will be for each segment and how they will be delivered
- A detailed budget breakdown for 2014 including expenditure, response and return by media/activity.
You may wish to consider carrying out some informal primary research among fellow students in order to help develop your plan.