Strategic Marketing Plan Assignment

Assignment Format

Introduction
This is the assignment which you will need to complete this term for the Marketing Management module. This assignment counts for 85% of your overall assessment for this module. This will involve you working individually.

This assignment takes the form of a written exercise. As such, it calls upon you to apply the marketing knowledge and skills you have developed to date to do a detailed Strategic Marketing Plan for a product.

Assignment Format
(i) Your work must be presented in a business report format, an example follows below. This means structuring the content within it by using appropriate headings and sub-headings as well as having a coversheet with title, names of authors and date, plus a structured table of contents with corresponding page numbers. Detailed pages of numerical data should be put in a separate appendix (or appendices if more than one needed – but you shouldn’t need these!) with a title and number for each appendix.

(ii) All sources used in compiling your report must be fully acknowledged and referenced using the Harvard style, there is advice from Academic Skills and Knowledge if needed. Failure to do this will incur penalties and will ultimately affect your mark for the assignment.

(iii) As some of the marks for this exercise are awarded for presentation and communication, it is important that your work is written in correct, formal English (this also means using correct punctuation and spelling so please use the standard grammar and spell checkers in Word or Grammarly). Ensure your work is thoroughly proofread before submission so that you do not lose marks for poor presentation, but it must be your own work.

Deadline and Procedure for Submission
You must submit ONE copy of your report via Turnitin by 10.00 am Wednesday 3rd March 2021 (week 7).

Word length
3,500 words (maximum), excluding graphs/tables/appendices.

Details about the Strategic Marketing Plan
The Market
Please briefly summarise the market you chose for your Marketing Fundamentals assignment. Do not copy and paste, nor repeat in a paraphrased manner as this may constitute self-plagiarism. A very brief summary, stating the country and the key points for the new flavour product from Coca-Cola as a SWOT analysis is sufficient.

Your Task
For this assignment, you will need to develop a strategic marketing plan for a new Rolls Royce car. Again this will be entirely different from the plan you produced before, in so far as that was a tactical plan ready for implementation whereas this will be strategic marketing plan, using the tools from this term. Please see the required contents below.

Deadline and Procedure for Submission

Required Contents
Your Strategic Marketing plan should include the following sections:
• An executive summary outlining the main findings of your analysis/recommendations. This should not be over a page, preferably even
less than this.
• A brief overview of the market for the product; i.e. a SWOT.

• A detailed market analysis. This should include the following:
o segments in the market. You should estimate the size of each market segment. You may use the exercise from Lecture 1 in this module to
help you perform market segmentation. Make sure that you can explain how you arrive at your estimates.

o the newproduct’s expected performance against the main competitors in one of the segments. Explain why you chose this particular segment
for analysis. I recommend that you keep to one segment ONLY for the purposes of this report; however, if you are sure that you can stay within the word limit, feel free to choose more than one segment.

• Marketing objectives in your chosen segment(s) for your chosen product for the next three years. Make sure that these make sense. They should be written in a single sentence that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timed. E.g. The new flavour Coke to gain 10% market share in the first year from launch.

• Marketing strategies for this segment for the first year from launch, using the ange of theoretical tools introduced during the Marketing Management course. You do not need to discuss the tactical mix, activities and implementation plan and controls that were all addressed in Marketing Fundamentals.

• Last term you did the work of the Marketing Executive, creating a tactical plan which you would implement with marketing colleagues. This term you are mirroring the work of a Marketing Manager, who creates a strategic plan that the Marketing Executive uses for reference to create a coordinated tactical plan. As such, you should write your work as though you would be taking it to the Marketing Director/Board for approval, rather than focusing on the operational details of a launch campaign such as brand development (you did this last term so do not replicate!).

The word limit for this assignment is 3,500 words, excluding the references, tables and figures. This is well below what a real-life marketing plan should be, therefore your Strategic Marketing Plan should be limited to one product market, one segment and should end at marketing strategies. You do not need to reflect on how the plan will be implemented, budgeted etc.

Details about the Strategic Marketing Plan

You are welcome to use any additional theory/concept you would like in your Strategic Marketing Plan. These will count towards the quality of analysis if used correctly. You must however use the range of strategic marketing tools taught during Marketing Management.

Searching for Information
It is expected that you will consult a considerable variety of information sources, even if you are simply reviewing those used last term. This is because you will not find all  relevant information in one convenient source (that is the nature of market information!). It is also quite possible that you will not be able to find everything that you would ideally like in order to conduct a comprehensive analysis, but you will at least need to try and provide evidence that you have done so! (This is not uncommon in business, but managers still have to make decisions, even if the information is not perfect – there are often information gaps and these plus realistic assumptions should be stated).

You should use the electronic databases such as EBSCO Discovery available online through the university library resources to conduct your search, as well as other search engines such as Google and Google Scholar. There are videos on the Library pages to help you and you will need to log in to access journals that are available via the University of Buckingham subscriptions. You are not expected to purchase material which is only commercially available. Useful information sources will not only take the form of market reports but also features or short articles in magazines such as Marketing Week or Campaign (accessible via Library Resources) and industry trade journals.

Other Information
You are highly recommended to start working on your Strategic Marketing Plan from week 5. You will see that the lectures and tutorials give you specific, practical knowledge that can be put into your strategic marketing plan.

You are also recommended to ask your tutors specific questions related to the Marketing Plan in tutorials. The sooner you do it, the clearer it will be to you how to produce a good report.

Assessment Criteria (how your work will be assessed/marked)
The following criteria and weightings will be used to assess your reports:

• Research Effort (20% of marks)
This refers to the range of relevant sources that have been consulted and used in this exercise and the quality of information drawn from these sources. Students who limit their research to very few sources cannot expect to get high marks under this criterion. It is not sufficient to cite a wide range of sources – You do not need to do more than summarise your findings, you will need to demonstrate that you have made use of them in your analysis.

• Use of Theory (30% of marks)
This refers to the range of theoretical models, concepts and frameworks included from the course and their correct understanding and usage. It is not sufficient to use only one or two, nor to include all but superficially without depth of analysis.

• Quality of Analysis (30% of marks)
This involves applying concepts and frameworks you have learned in your marketing studies to date in helping you to create a strategic marketing plan.

This also involves the quality of your recommendations going forward (objectives and strategies).

• Presentation, Communication & Referencing (20% of marks)
This refers to the way you present your work (formal business report, suitably structured under relevant headings and subheadings, using an appropriate layout of material on each page); clear, correct, formal English (as is expected in a business report), properly punctuated, with correct spelling. This criterion also includes correct referencing. Poor or incorrect referencing will be penalised.