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MKTG1025 Marketing Principles - Assignment 2

Overview

In this assessment, you will complete the first part of your marketing plan in a group of 3 to 4 students. This includes identifying the organisations mission, analysing the environment and competitive market, identifying the consumer segments in the brand’s category, and defining the brand positioning in the category.

The purpose of this assessment is to:

· develop your capacity to demonstrate knowledge of the components of a marketing plan; and

apply the knowledge through the construction of a professional marketing plan for an assigned

This assessment will develop your skills in business analysis, problem-solving, creativity and presenting information in a clear logical manner.

Assessment criteria

This assessment will measure your ability to:

Research and identify the brand owner, the company mission and brand contribution

· Formulate a competitive market analysis

Identify and analyse the macro and micro environmental factors effecting your brand

· Analyse the customer segments in the category your brand operates

Analyse and identify your brand position

· Identify critical issues that impact your marketing plan through undertaking a SWOT analysis

Produce a clear, logical, and professional looking report

Assessment details

This assessment is to be prepared as a report from the brief provided in Week 2. Through your tutorial activities in Weeks 2 to 5 you should already have much of the material required to complete the report.

Your report should follow the following structure. Suggested word count in brackets for each section:

More detail for each section can be found on the following pages.

Note: instruction and tips are in italics beneath the section heading or subheading.

Title page

This must include the following information:

The company and brand name
Your tutor’s name
Group details:

- Full name of each student (as it appears in your enrolment); and student number (s1234567)

Due date
Date of submission

Executive Summary

This is a one-page summary of the key highlights of your report. Remember your audience – your manager.

1. Company Mission and brand contribution

Company introduction and mission

Best approach to start this section is to undertake desk research on your organisation. Visit the company website and review their annual report (if one is available). Also, undertake research in the library databases (Passport, IBISWorld, Factiva, ProQuest, EbscoHost etc).

Start by introducing your organisation by discussing briefly who owns the organisation (for example, is it part of a larger multinational/global company), how long the company has operated in Australia and overall, how much market share the company has in the category under evaluation.

Then locate their company mission and copy it into the introduction. The section should be ~100 words (not more than 2 short paragraphs)

1.2. Brand contribution

Start by identifying the portfolio of brands the organisation manages.

Discuss how your allocated brand fits within portfolio and the contribution you believe it makes to the organisation’s mission. This brief review will help to set the scene of the importance of the brand within the organisation. It will help later determine various marketing strategies you may engage to maintain or grow the brand.

Tip: We recommend the brand contribution section contain visuals of the organisation’s portfolio and various products within the brand under evaluation.

The section should be ~200 words (not more than 3 short paragraphs)

2. Competitive market analysis

When undertaking a competitive market analysis, it is important to understand not only the industry your brand belongs to, but also, the several categories, segments and sub segments that form the industry.

Take a look at the diagram below that shows how the category of bottled water within the soft drinks industry is divided:

Notes:

Majority, but not all categories have segments, also not all segments have subsegments (noted by the n/a – not applicable)
Not all information is contained in one single report in the Passport database. You will need to refer to related

It is a good habit when developing a marketing plan, if you are not familiar with the industry, to first draw out the structure so you know at what levels you will be reporting, at a surface level versus deep diving.

2.1. Market size

Industry and category

Now that you have mapped the industry structure, refer to your industry level report.

From the industry report, start by defining and describing the industry your brand operates in.

The broader the definition, the more competitors there are likely to be, and the narrower the definition, the less scope there is for market segmentation and finding new users for your product.

Produce a table from the category data along with a trend graph.

Briefly make a few important statements regarding the industry level performance you see from the graph and data. Important statements might include which category represents the largest share, which category is growing most significantly in absolute terms, what is the trend over the past 5 years for each category. Also look at the projected growth.

Tip: using Passport database, you can obtain the forecasted or projected growth.

Do the same for Company and Brand - identifying the three companies that have the largest market share, or achieving the highest growth over the past five years; and the three or four brands that are your brand’s largest competitors and how they have been performing.

This does not need to be more than a short paragraph on each (industry, company, and brand) so around 250 words.

Tip: put the data in the Appendix and your graph in the body of your work to manage the word limit.

Segment and sub segments

Now drill down further. Determine which category your focal brand operates in and perform a similar analysis at the category level (discussing the segments and subsegments), as well as brand shares and competitors.

This will be around the same word count as Industry – approximately 700 words

When undertaking your analysis, quantify the size of the market in terms of volume (000’s tonnes, cases, kilos) or value terms (‘000s AUD)

3. Environmental Analysis

Micro factors

3.2. Macro factors

Analyse the micro marketing trends affecting the marketplace. Include only those issues that are relevant to your industry. Consider the company, supplier, marketing intermediaries, competitors, publics, and customer trends.

Macro factors

Analyse the macro marketing trends affecting this marketplace. Include only those issues that are relevant to your industry. Consider the demographic, economic, natural, technological, political/legal, and cultural trends.

Tips:

Include the detail of your findings for both the micro and macro environment analysis in table form in your appendix. You must list not less than two findings per factor. Example macro environment below:

Complete the table above for each factor within micro and macro environment.

From the analysis across all factors within each environment, identify three findings that you consider to be most important and impacting your company and brand. Discuss the three items in the body of your report.

Good secondary research sources include brand and company websites, industry reports and articles, government websites, annual reports etc.

When developing the micro and macro environmental analysis, consider if each of your findings is a strength for the company, a weakness, an opportunity, or a threat.

Each section (micro and macro) should be ~300 words.

4. Segmentation matrix

In this section of the plan, you are trying to understand the various customer segments in the marketplace.

You should attempt to divide the market into discrete segments applying the criterion of segmentation – describing these segments using a segmentation table.

Your aim is to build ‘profiles’ of each segment to aid in our understanding of what, where, when, why and how often these customers buy products in this market.

You may even identify a segment that is currently not being served and in doing so you have uncovered a major opportunity.

Discuss in this section the type of buying process involved in your marketplace, how decisions are made, who influences these decisions and any other issues that are important to the decision-making process.

IMPORTANT: each person must develop one segment in consultation with the group.

A summarised example layout is below. Please refer to the learning materials for a full segmentation table that you must apply.

In Assessment 3, you will be required to develop your marketing plan focusing on the segment YOU developed.

As this section is a table and in short bullet point, word count does not apply.

5. Positioning

Does your brand have a unique position in the market? What attributes/benefits/advantages is your positioning based on? A perceptual map is a great tool to illustrate your positioning.

5.1. Positioning map

When constructing a perceptual map, you must consider two essential elements:

What are the variables that influence (motivate) the consumer to buy the segment offerings; and
Who are the competitors?

This information is then placed on a diagram to illustrate the position in the market against competitor brands.

This information connects to the segmentation table.

5.2. Brand Positioning Statement

This is a quick statement that describes your brand. Such as: For [ target customer segment] who [statement of need or opportunity], [brand name] is a [product category] that [key benefit or compelling reason to buy].

Refer to your learning materials for the structure of the positioning statement.

No explanation of the statement is required. The statement should be able to stand on its own.

6. SWOT

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The SWOT analysis is a summary of the external and internal analyses, highlighting the critical issues that must be addressed by the marketing plan. When the SWOT analysis is completed, the firm has a clear idea of its focus for the next planning period.

It is important when constructing a swot, not to introduce any new information. The SWOT is a summary output of what has already been analysed in the earlier part of the report. For example, if you did not discuss the importance of innovation in the category and how your brand delivers on this key success factor, then you should not list it in the SWOT summary.

Internal	Strengths	Weaknesses
Internal	· What do we do better as an organisation or brand than competitors? · What advantages do we have over competitors?	· In what areas do we need to improve our operations or marketing mix to be more competitive?
External	Opportunities	Threats
External	· What new opportunities exist in the marketplace for our brand?	· What threats do we anticipate to our business from the external environment that may challenge or weaken our brand position?

Once you’ve developed the SWOT table, you do not need to write anything further. The table should speak for itself.

Reference list

Reference list must be constructed applying Harvard Referencing Style.

Appendix

Construct your appendix using appropriate headings and in order of where the reference to the appendix is situated in the report.

For example:

Appendix 1 – Market data

Appendix 2 – Environmental analysis etc.

As the appendix should be analysis, and therefore will be a series of tables, not long written paragraphs, you do not need to intext cite applying Harvard referencing style. Supplying a URL link to where the information was derived, or a statement of the name of the document will be sufficient.

It is also important in the appendix to be clear where you have made assumptions due to lack of publicly available information.

Referencing guidelines

Use RMIT Harvard referencing style for this assessment.

You must acknowledge all the courses of information you have used in your assessments.

Refer to the RMIT Easy Cite referencing tool to see examples and tips on how to reference in the appropriated style. You can also refer to the library referencing page for more tools such as EndNote, referencing tutorials and referencing guides for printing.