MARKETING PLAN PROJECT

Part 1 (covering chapters 1-3)

Your goal: To begin drafting a creative and practical marketing plan, including a mission statement, marketing objectives, and SWOT analysis.

This is your opportunity to play the role of marketing manager and gain valuable, first-hand experience in writing, organizing, and polishing a marketing plan. Over the course of seven assignments, you'll apply what you're learning about marketing and make decisions about either an existing product (a good or a service), a new product to be launched, or a product or company suggested by your instructor.

The point of this project is to create a single marketing document for use incommunicatinga clearmarketing vision to guide decisions,clarifyingobjectives and priorities,delineatingmarketing activities, andmonitoringand evaluatingmarketing performance. As you move from one assignment to the next, you may find yourself returning to earlier answers and adding or revising as new or different ideas occur to you. Save all of your answers and notes, so you can refresh your memory throughout the project.

If you're making decisions about an existing product, choose one that's well known so you can research the product's competition, features and benefits, customers, distribution, promotion, and pricing. If your marketing plan is about a product that doesn't exist yet, consider whether anything like it is already being marketed, who buys that type of product, and the competition in that industry. If your instructor assigns you to write a plan for a particular product or company, do your homework to understand the background before you begin the first assignment.

You won't be writing your marketing plan in the same order as your readers will see it. Why not? Because the "Executive Summary" appears first in the plan, but you can't sum up your ideas until you've written everything else. So the summary is the last section you'll write, after you've thought about implementation and performance evaluation. Now get ready for your first assignment as a marketing manager preparing a marketing plan.

1. Start by briefly describing the good or service you're marketing, why your product is needed, and the customers who are likely to buy it. Also sketch out the company's situation and what you want to accomplish with this marketing plan. Save these answers and be prepared to refine it into two paragraphs later in this project. In the final assignment, your overview will become part of the Executive Summary.
2. The product is:(such as a highly durable mountain bike, a nutritious and tasty snack product, or a scanning service for digitizing fragile photos)
3. Why the product is needed:(such as needing a sturdier bike for rocky terrain, needing a snack that's healthy and convenient, or needing a way to save old photographs by scanning them)
4. The customers for this product are likely to be:(such as mountain-biking enthusiasts, parents buying snacks for children, or people who want to digitally preserve fragile family photos)
5. In a few sentences, the company's situation and the purpose of this marketing plan are:(such as: a startup company preparing to launch an innovative new product; a division of a major corporation putting more marketing support behind a particular product; or an international company planning to introduce a product in the United States)