Report on Evaluating and Enhancing Marketing Strategy for the Launch of a New Product/Service

Scenario

You should assume the same role in the report as that which you adopted in the presentations, in the scenario of an invitation to you personally from the Brand Manager of the new product/service to demonstrate that you can critically evaluate the current proposition and identify areas for improvement to enhance the potential for the product and brand.  You have been asked to write a report to review and discuss how the key elements of marketing strategy and its application to practice would be instrumental in considering the future launch and success of your product/service if/when it goes to market, and the means by which evaluation and control on those strategic decisions could be made.  

The Brand Manager is a practitioner not an academic and has expressed an interest in how the theory you learned as a student has led you to your conclusions and can inform, and be applied to, the practical process of new product development.  Therefore, whilst the assignment requires academic underpinning you are required to use a combination of theory and practical examples in your report (3000 words maximum; Appendices may be included providing they are used to good effect; inappropriate use of information in tables e.g. to seemingly extend the word limit, will be discounted and penalised).

The whole report in 3rd person context with journal articles.

The issues you have been asked to address in your report include:

Task 1

As an introduction to the report you should provide a brief re-cap/summary of the new product/brand which the npd team you were working in delivered during the presentations.  

You have now been asked to critically review that proposition to identify, and justify, any amendments which you would/could make to the original proposals for the product.  As these amendments will have implications for different strategies across the 4Ps of the marketing mix, you should identify which strategies, and metrics, would be appropriate within each component, with justification for such, to reinforce the point of difference which needs to be apparent in the development and introduction of new products/services, and in particular to the enhanced proposal your amendments present.

Task 2

However, as the traditional goods oriented perspective, represented by the 4Ps, is no longer solely appropriate for many companies that operate in dynamic business environments, there has been a paradigm shift in marketing literature and practices as more emphasis is now being given to intangible resources as an integral part of the product/service offering.  In light of this you should critically analyse and recommend the best strategic options for your amended product/service across the components of the Extended Marketing Mix, i.e. the additional 3Ps that make up the 7Ps model, and suggest the appropriate marketing metrics that could be applied to each component, justifying your choices and indicating the relevance and benefits that this perspective might bring to add value to your proposition whilst enabling management to exercise evaluation and control. You should discuss this development, drawing on relevant literature/research findings and examples pertaining to services marketing, relationship marketing, internal marketing and social and ethical marketing issues.

Task 3

As your company is keen to optimise customer engagement with your product/brand, you have been asked you to identify different touch points which could be used in the launch of your product.  You should identify some of the key issues and strategies from the previous tasks to justify/dismiss your choices and indicate how they relate to target marketing strategy for enhancing the potential for customer engagement and added value.  Again, you need to identify the marketing metrics that would be most appropriate across this process, analysing how and why they would contribute to the evaluation and control when analysing the success of your product when it goes to market