Marketing Report: Target Market Persona, Marketing Mix Analysis and Recommendations

Executive summary

On a separate page, your executive summary provides a brief overview (half a page to a page) of your entire report. It should include what you did, how you did it, what your main findings were and what your key recommendations are. Although the executive summary appears at the beginning of the document, it should be written last after completing the assessment. This section is excluded from the word count.

This section explains to your reader what you are going to tell them in the body of your report. It gives the background to the report and explains why it is useful. Moreover, it should state the aim/purpose and objective/s of the report, should mention any limitations and should present a very brief summary of the sections.

As you have already discussed your organisation (brand) and product (good or service) in the first assessment, you can very briefly paraphrase some of that key information to give a little context. Make sure to rephrase and not self-plagiarise. 

The introduction also gives a good opportunity to summarise key findings from the first assessment, such as the target market, to help set the scene for the discussion of your persona (only one) in the report. This section is included in the word count.

Describe a (only one) data driven customer persona in detail (that should represent the target market segment identified in your first assessment). For example, if your target market was men and women, above 25 years old etc., why did you choose to focus your persona creation on women? Are they a bigger part of your target market? Or, are they are new target market? etc. Overall, this section should start by briefly addressing the question: ‘Why did you focus on this particular persona?’

Use the following sub-headings in your persona’s description: 1. Semi-Fictional Character (name, title, and picture); 2. Day in a Life; 3. Demographic and Behavioural Info; 4. Goals of the Persona; 5. Pain Points; 6. Information Search Process; 7. Type of Experience Desired; 8. Common Objections. This section is included in the word count.

Conduct a marketing mix (7Ps) analysis with links to marketing theories and evaluate its effectiveness in addressing the needs of your customer persona.

In this section, you should consider the comments made in the following seminal article:

Magrath, A J 1986, ‘When marketing services 4Ps are not enough’, Business Horizons, May-June, pp. 44-50.

This section is included in the word count.

Provide justified marketing mix recommendations for your customer persona. The recommendations should be based on your evaluation of the current marketing mix, the recommended positioning and identification of gaps in addressing the needs of your customer persona. Include and discuss ethical considerations and implications, when proposing these marketing mix recommendations.

Literature should also be brought in when deciding what to recommend in order to strengthen your argument. For example, if you are proposing a loyalty program, use the literature to, e.g.  introduce what a loyalty program is, how common these programs are in customer service, how successful they are, etc.  This section is included in the word count.

5 Conclusion

The conclusion should be brief. It should summarise the whole of the assessment or project and tie it together without introducing new material. This section is included in the word count.

6 References 

On a separate page, type references here, in alphabetical order. See the AIB Style Guide for format. This section is excluded from the word count.