Assignment:
Marketing Plan Term Project (50 percent of final grade)
Overview
Over the course of the semester you will prepare a marketing plan that will demonstrate your ability to apply marketing concepts to a real-world product or service. This assessment is in lieu of a final examination and was designed to measure your performance on all course learning outcomes. A template will be provided as a reference/guide for the Marketing Plan.
Your plan will follow the marketing plan outline illustrated in table 2.2 of your textbook and further described in Appendix 1: Sample Marketing Plan for Sonic, a fictional product. THIS IS AN EXAMPLE ONLY. You will submit your Marketing Plan Term Project in two parts:
Part 1: Analysis of the current situation (30 percent of final grade)
Marketing Plan Term Project Requirements
Step 1: Select a Product or Service.
You will select a company and one of its specific products or services, for which you will prepare a marketing plan. Submit your choice to your faculty member for approval no later than the end of week 1.
Your choice of a product or service is important. Here are some tips to help you select an appropriate product or service:
• Select a consumer product or service that you or your family uses regularly. This will help give you insight into customer behaviors in the purchase decision and will also make it more interesting to work on because you like the product or service.
• Do not select an industrial or business-to-business good or service.
• Do not select a smartphone product, because it would be too close to the example in the textbook.
• Select a product or service that is large enough to have something written about it or its industry. This will help you find industry trends and competitive information via library research.
• Select a publicly held company's product or service. Again, there is more information available that will bring depth to your analysis. You will need revenue data, market-share data, or other measures to compare against competitive offerings.
• Stay with nationally known brand names so that your faculty member has some knowledge of your choice and therefore can be more helpful to you.
• Select a product or service that has some competition.
• Do not select a product or service idea. This must be a currently marketed product or service.
• You may consider selecting your own company if it meets the requirements above. If not, do not attempt it.
• Keep it simple. Do not try to tackle an entire conglomerate or company with multiple business units.
Here are some examples of products and services (or combination of product and service) that would be good choices for your
Marketing Plan Term Project:
• A soft drink or cola product (e.g., Coca-Cola Zero, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Evian bottled water, Gatorade)
• A national restaurant chain (e.g., Applebee's, Panera Bread)
• Personal-care products (e.g., Colgate toothpaste, Clinique, Olay, Johnson & Johnson Baby Care) Here you can choose the entire product line that is related. In other words, you would discuss all Colgate toothpaste product-line extensions, such as whiteners, cavity fighters, "total," children's toothpaste, etc.
• High-tech consumer products (e.g., 3D televisions, notepads, cell phones [not smartphones])
• A service (e.g., H&R Block, a credit card, an investment firm, an insurance company)
• Specific automobile models (e.g., Ford Fiesta, Toyota Prius, BMW's M3 series)
Before the end of Week 2 prepare a one-paragraph description of your choice, link the product's website, and submit it to your faculty member in the Marketing Plan Term Project Conference by the date noted in the course schedule. Your faculty member will approve your choice or make recommendations for you to consider.