MKTG450W:
Lesson 2: Marketing Strategy Planning
Lesson 2 Overview
This lesson is about the process of marketing strategy planning—deciding how to best serve the needs of the chosen customers. We will discuss how to approach the strategic planning process first and then concentrate on making decisions about marketing strategies. In other words, this lesson is all about deciding what your business is in, who your customers should be, and the best combination of features (price, promotion, product/brand attributes, distribution) for these customers. This is to say that the lesson determines product/service—marketing domain of the company.
Lesson Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to
- explain the general logic of strategic planning,
- apply the hedgehog concept to deciding what your business is all about,
- describe what makes a good mission and vision statement, and write a good mission and vision statement, and
- identify and describe the major parts of a marketing plan.
Lesson Roadmap
By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 2 Course Schedule.
General Logic of Strategic Planning
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where—" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"—so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
In the mad world of Wonderland, poor Alice does not know where she is going, what to do, or where to go. Lucky for you, students of marketing, you are in a much better situation! You will decide what your marketing goals and objectives are and then decide how to get there by planning appropriate marketing activities. This is what we call strategic marketing planning. So you will know where to go, how to get there, and when you've arrived!
Process of Strategic Planning
The process of strategic planning involves setting goals, objectives, and ways to reach them. In a nutshell, you decide on your most general goals and strategies first, and then you get more specific. Also, typically, the most general decisions are made at the corporate (top) level of the organization (for example, by the CEO); the middle and lower-level managers are responsible for specific action plans. As such, they deal with divisional (the Product Market unit) level, and functional (the Strategic Business unit) level issues.
For example, Penn State will formulate a strategic plan, and then its strategic business units, such as PSH (Penn State Harrisburg) Capital College or the Penn State World Campus, will formulate their own strategic plans in light of and in line with those of the whole University. Strategic plans for functional areas, such as marketing or information technology services, will follow the general strategic plan. Figure 2.1 below illustrates the process (Although the figure for illustrative purpose includes only PSH Capital College and the World Campus, there are more business units at Penn State beyond those two).
When deciding on where you are going and how you will get there, it is important to first define who and what you are and what you generally do. One can call this an organization's mission and vision statement(s).
Obviously, the strategy chosen depends on careful and thorough analysis of the internal environment as well as the external environment (the political, legal, technological, economic, cultural, and natural forces pertinent to the business along with information about the company's or the organization's customers, competitors, and other stakeholders). This is conducted by a PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) Analysis.
Your destination needs to be defined in such a way that you will know when you get there! In other words, your goals and objectives need to be specific, measurable, and clearly stated and defined. For example, compare two bread product companies. Company A sets a goal of "to get people to buy our new bread products," and Company B sets a goal of "to obtain 5% of fresh baked bread market in one year." Which company's objective do you think will produce better and clearer outcomes?
Often, an organization will set its marketing objectives in terms of actual sales amounts or market share and sales growth—for example, stating that the company wants to be a leader (have the highest market share in the market), to stimulate 30% Harrisburg consumers to try one loaf of fresh-baked bread, to increase its existing market share by 18%, or a commitment to grow in the baked-goods market as much as twice as last year, or to gradually increase the budget up to $1 million, $2 millions, and $3 millions in the next three years.
Also, keep in mind that this sequence is not totally set in stone. We say that we start with the mission statement, but you could make the philosophical argument that even mission statements are impossible to develop without knowing something about the environment. It seems to me, though, that the real conversation about our situation takes place at the stage where we decide what we are really trying to achieve.
For example, if I decide that I want to be a trainer, the logic would apply like this:
- I would state my mission, something like "to help people get stronger and healthier."
- Second, I would research the training market to figure out the changes and developments taking place. After conducting research on the state of the training market, my objective would be something like, "I will aim to attract about 20 clients who would see me about once a week."
- Third, I would look at the data even more and figure out that the best way for me to achieve my objective would be to deal with older people (my target market); what I can offer them is strength training, healthy life style, and restoring mobility (the product/service feature). The best way to reach the target market would be to put an ad in the AARP magazine, stating that each training session should be about $50, and so on. Of course, after doing that for a little while and gaining some real sense for what I am doing for my target market, I would reformulate the mission statement to say something like "I help people be happy, active, mobile, and independent through strength training."
Here's the thing: As with any process, it is never just A through Z and that's it. We look back, evaluate, re-evaluate, and change things as needed. When trying to explain how it works, though, we first need to understand the A–Z (Figure 2.2).
References
Carroll, L. (1865). Alice's adventures in wonderland. In Alice's adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass (2010 ed., pp. 7–115). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Figure 2.3. Questions for Strategic Objectives
More on Choosing What to Do: The Hedgehog Concept
Jim Collins, in his highly acclaimed book Good to Great, describes how truly great companies chose what they strategically focus on.
As Collins points out, the fox wants to eat the hedgehog; that's a metaphor for a business in the sea of competition. The fox knows and performs a great number of different things, and the hedgehog just knows one thing, but it does it very well: it can roll into a ball, sticking needles every which way. The fox, in this metaphor, can never eat the hedgehog. Jim Collins, an extraordinarily successful business consultant, thinks that, to be great, you need to be like a hedgehog.
The moral of the hedgehog story is this: a business must very carefully select its focus and then pursue it relentlessly. This approach works on every level, even for your own personal development. To choose your strategic objectives, you need to ask three questions:
- What can you be the best in the world at?
You have to identify what you do better than anyone else? Be honest when considering the weakness. Remember that not being the best in certain areas is alright. Discover your true talent by conducting a SWOT analysis and core competency analysis. These tools will show you what you do well already, and help you determine where you can excel.
- What are you truly passionate about?
You have to figure out what your passions and values are. Think about what makes you passionate at work? What are you most excited about? What is your purpose in life? What motivates you and what are your driving corse values? What are your mission and vision statements?
- What can be profitable?
You have to determine how you generate sustained revenue base or yourself and/or the organization you work for. You also need to show you can maintain long-term success, hence progressively increasing your remuneration.
It is at the intersection of these three that your focus should lie. Figure 2.3 illustrates this point.
References
Collins, J. (2001). Good to great. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
What the Business Is About: Mission Statement
As with so many other tools, mission statements can end up being meaningless, with the time spent creating them completely wasted. Below is a video in which Weird Al Yankovic, an American singer, makes fun of such meaningless mission statements.
Watch Video 2.1: "Weird Al" Yankovic - Mission Statement
[MUSIC PLAYING]
"WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: (SINGNG) We must all efficiently operationalize our strategies. Invest in world-class technology and leverage our core competencies in order to holistically administrate exceptional synergy. We'll set a brand trajectory using management philosophy. Advance our market share vis-a-vis a proven methodology. With strong commitment to quality effectively enhancing corporate synergy. Transitioning our company by awareness of functionality. Promoting viability, providing our supply chain with diversity. We will distill our identity through client-centric solutions and synergy. At the end of the day, we must monetize our assets. Fundamentals of change can you visualize a value-added experience that will grow the business infrastructure and monetize our assets. Bringing to the table our capitalized reputation, proactively overseeing day-to-day operations. Services and deliverables with cross-platform innovation. Networking soon will bring seamless integration. Robust and scalable bleeding-edge and next generation. Best of breed, we'll succeed in achieving globalization. Gaining traction with our resources in the marketplace. It's mission critical to stay incentivized. Against this purple-poster-flexible-solutions for our customer base. If you can't think outside the box, you'll be downsized. It's a paradigm shift. Hey, hey. Look out. Well, it's a paradigm shift, now! Here we go! Here we go! here we go! Here we go! Hah!
Take a look at the following statement.
Does this seem like meaningless gibberish to you? It should! After all, it was randomly generated by an online mission statement generator.
Meaningless mission statements are made up of words that mean nothing, just a string of buzzwords that have no bearing or relevance to what the business is actually about. Both Weird Al's song and the random generator are making fun of them.
In the current business literature, various authors use the ideas of the vision statement and the mission statement somewhat differently, but the core remains the same: your strategic planning starts with formulating a statement of what your business is all about. This statement needs to be meaningful, reasonably short, and able to inspire the employees of the company. You also need to make it measurable in order to ensure that you are moving in the direction of your mission. In simple terms, the mission statement explains the company's reason for existence.
The mission statement of a firm shapes the direction the company wants to follow and be in over a specified duration. The Mission Statement Academy analyzes Amazon Mission and Vision Statement, and makes the following statement (Mission Statement Academy, n.d., para. 7–8):
"Amazon vision statement focuses on dominating at the global level while giving its customers worthwhile shopping experience...The mission statement is all about the attractiveness of the overall service that the company has in store for its clientele. Particularly, Amazon points at the affordability and other customer-friendly elements that distinguishes the company from its competitors. The success of the model adopted by this establishment highly depends on the mission and vision, together with the core values, which are fundamental to the running of the operations of the company."
Watch Video 2.2 Founder Jeff Bezos discusses Amazon Business Model Mission
INTERVIEWER: Your goal is to be the largest online-- and you are-- retailer in the world. Beyond that, what's the goal?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, our mission is Earth's most customer-centric company.
INTERVIEWER: I don't even know what that means.
JEFF BEZOS: Well, let me-- I'll give you an example. Right after World War II, Moritasan, the guy who founded Sony, set as the mission for Sony that they were going to make Japan known for quality. And you have to remember, this was a time when Japan was known for cheap copycat products. And Moritasan said-- he didn't say, we're going to make Sony known for quality. He said, we're going to make Japan known for quality. He chose a mission for Sony that was bigger than Sony.
And when we talk about Earth's most customer-centric company, we have a similar idea in mind. We want other companies to look at Amazon and see us as a standard bearer for obsessive focus on the customer, as opposed to obsessive focus on the competitor. So that's one of the reasons we work on differentiated products. It's one of the reasons we take a long-term viewpoint on things. You can't really do the right thing for customers if you're short-term oriented.
And if you're going to invent new things, you've also got to be able-- and this goes along with long-term orientation. You've got to be willing to endure a lot of criticism. They're going to put-- Kindle is a good example. If you're going to put your back into reinventing a 500-year-old industry, some folks are going to get ornery.
INTERVIEWER: It was also feared at one time, those people who had had your stock, that once Walmart, for example, got serious about being online, they were going to blow you away. Why didn't that happen?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, I think it's because we did a good job for our customers. So we have-- you go back in time, and we've been called Amazon.toast.
INTERVIEWER: Right, I remember.
JEFF BEZOS: Amazon.con, Amazon.bomb. This is all, like, in the first three years of our existence. And that's part of what I'm talking about, the willingness to be misunderstood. If you're going to do things, we lay out what we're doing, and we tell people how we think about things.
I'm saying to people, the iPad is not a Kindle killer. I'm very clear about that. But it doesn't keep people from writing that. And I'm very clear about why. It's a totally differentiated device. It's $139, works in bright sunlight. You can read with one hand, it's so light. And the battery lasts a month. For $139, why wouldn't you want a device like that?
INTERVIEWER: OK, but let me go back to the Walmart issue, though. What was it that made you able to sustain a challenge from the world's greatest retailer?
JEFF BEZOS: Obsessive customer focus on--
INTERVIEWER: How do you focus on the customer better than they focus on the customer?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, we, first of all--
INTERVIEWER: I mean, they're pretty good at focusing on the customer, too.
JEFF BEZOS: But we're very differentiated in how we do it. And so our approach, if you think about our retail business, which think is what you're asking about here, the really three things that we know are critical--
INTERVIEWER: That's the heart and soul of your business, isn't it?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, and especially relative to the Walmart question, I think that's the key. It's selection, low prices, and fast, convenient, reliable delivery, so the shipment side. And so we have--
INTERVIEWER: Wait, wait, wait. So Walmart doesn't have low prices, fast and convenient delivery?
JEFF BEZOS: I would claim that Amazon has much broader selection. In many cases-- I don't want to be overly bold in my claim, but the online model gives us significant cost structure advantages that lets us have even lower prices than physical stores.
INTERVIEWER: Selling online.
JEFF BEZOS: Well, sometimes they do have an umbrella problem sometimes where they don't want to compete against themselves online versus offline.
INTERVIEWER: But at Walmart, with all of the volume that it buys, its purchasing power therefore gives it the ability to offer lower prices. Doesn't that give them an advantage they ought to be able to translate? Because their purchasing power is bigger than your purchasing power, is it not?
JEFF BEZOS: I think in a lot of the product categories, that ship sailed a long time ago.
INTERVIEWER: Meaning what?
JEFF BEZOS: Meaning that we have--
INTERVIEWER: The purchasing power to compete with anybody.
JEFF BEZOS: We have the volume relationships with suppliers. That playing field has been leveled. If you'd asked me that question 10 or 15 years ago, I'd have agreed with you--
INTERVIEWER: That there was a challenge you had to overcome.
JEFF BEZOS: But even then, our profitability is not our customers' problem. We don't take the point of view that we're going to price products at a particular margin for ourselves. We say, we're going to price products competitively. And if that means on that product that we lose money, that's OK because we need to take care of the customer and earn trust. And we'll figure out over time. And if we find we can't ever make money with that product, we'll stop selling it.
But we don't want to-- we're not going to make customers pay for any of our inefficiencies, if you see what I'm saying.
INTERVIEWER: Did you lose money on the Kindle?
JEFF BEZOS: Every new business that we have ever invested in, it has taken years. Most businesses have either no impact on our financials for the first five to seven years or a negative impact on our financials for the first five to seven years. And we do a lot of new things. And the company is very healthy financially. We're doing very well. And it's an outcome of customer obsession.
So when we were Amazon.toast, that was because Barnes and Noble had-- when we were declared Amazon.toast, I think we had 150 employees. Barnes and Noble had 30,000 employees. And somebody wrote an article that said, Amazon has had a great two-year run, but now the big boys have shown up and they're going to steamroll them.
And we had an all-hands meeting, called all 150 employees together, and I said, look-- because everybody's read it. Every employee has read the Amazon.toast article. Every mother of every employee has read the Amazon.toast article and has called--
INTERVIEWER: [INAUDIBLE] father, mother who're living in New York.
JEFF BEZOS: Are you OK? And so we had an all-hands meeting, and I said, look, you should wake up worried, terrified every morning. But don't be worried about our competitors because they're never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused.
And so most of these are big markets. Another way to answer your question about competitors and Walmart is I said, look, they can succeed fabulously, and it won't stop us from succeeding. These retail markets are huge.
So it often doesn't make sense for us to think of it as a pitched battle. Sometimes people think about business as it's kind of like a sporting event. There's a winner and a loser.
INTERVIEWER: It's not a zero-sum game.
JEFF BEZOS: It usually isn't. I'm sure there are cases where-- but most often, industries succeed. So I can tell you, I think e-commerce is succeeding. And the way we think about it, nobody else has to fail for us to do well. I think e-books is like that. I think there are going to be many winners. I think e-books is going to be a huge industry.
INTERVIEWER: Well, there are many competitors now. You've got Barnes and Noble is one of them, and Sony is another now.
JEFF BEZOS: And they're going to continue to be. And there'll be more.
INTERVIEWER: Apple is another.
JEFF BEZOS: But I have a list of 50 competitors that we could walk through all over the world, doing different things. And our focus is going to be, we'll try to pay attention to those competitors, but we're not going to obsess over them. We're going to obsess over readers because those are the people who are buying that device. And we're going to make it-- and it's not just a business for us, it's a mission for us. And missionaries build better products.
INTERVIEWER: What is Jeff Bezos thinking about today in 2010 that we might not know anything about, that he thinks may be a reality in 2013 or 2015? Where is the--
JEFF BEZOS: One of the things is the Amazon Web Services business. Now, there is a business that probably is not--
INTERVIEWER: This is Amazon cloud stuff?
JEFF BEZOS: Yes. And there's a business that's growing. It's in a hypergrowth phase. It's already a significant business. That's a business that probably is not getting as much attention as it deserves.
INTERVIEWER: [INAUDIBLE] play in the cloud business now?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, in the infrastructure part of it, which is the part that we play in, Amazon is by far the leader. And it started mostly with startup companies, but now it's big enterprises adopting.
The best analogy I can give you for this is it's like the electric grid. So instead of-- right now, big companies build their own data centers. And they buy their own servers and they put it in. It's a lot of CapEx. There's a lot of price of admission. If you're going to operate a data center, you have to do it well.
But it doesn't differentiate you from your competitors. It's just a price of admission. And so what we do at Amazon Web Services is we sell compute by the hour. We sell compute by the drink. It's just like buying electricity off the grid instead of having your own power manufacturing, your own power generating plant.
Let's also take a look at the Penn State Mission on the University website.
This mission is the result of a lengthy and involved process that included faculty and staff. It is very difficult to create a great mission statement; this mission is a passable example—it outlines what Penn State University is about. If anything, it could be more inspirational.
MISSION
The Pennsylvania State University is a multi-campus, land-grant, public research University that educates students from around the world, and supports individuals and communities through integrated programs of teaching, research, and service.
Our instructional mission includes undergraduate, graduate, professional, continuing, and extension education, offered through both resident instruction and distance learning. Our educational programs are enriched by the talent, knowledge, diversity, creativity, and teaching and research acumen of our faculty, students, and staff.
Our discovery-oriented, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research and scholarship promote human and economic development, global understanding, and advancement in professional practice through the expansion of knowledge and its applications in the natural and applied sciences, social and behavioral sciences, engineering, technology, arts and humanities, and myriad professions.
As Pennsylvania’s land-grant university, we provide unparalleled access to education and public service to support the citizens of the Commonwealth and beyond. We engage in collaborative activities with private sector, educational, and governmental partners worldwide to generate, integrate, apply, and disseminate knowledge that is valuable to society.
Mission statements are not static in nature. They are dynamic, and, as businesses and their environments change, mission statements might need to be revised. For example, Google's mission of "organizing the world's information" fit it quite well while it was only a search engine. But now that Google is expanding, CEO Page says, "I think the mission statement is probably a little bit too narrow, and we're thinking about how to do that a little more broadly" (quoted in Nieva, 2015, para. 3). Google significantly broadened its original search mission to extending its existing software-led participation— Android, Maps, and other domains—and changing the corporate name to Alphabet (Capon, 2016, p. 182).
Exhibit 2.2 on p. 31 of the textbook provides detailed examples of some successful companies' mission statements and how these statements evolved over time.
Self-Check Exercise
References
Capon, N. (2016). Managing marketing in the 21st century. (4th ed.). New York, NY: Wessex Press.
Mission Statement Academy (n.d). Amazon Mission and Vision Statement Analysis. Retrieved from https://mission-statement.com/amazon/Nieva, R. (2015). 4 things to expect from Google in 2015. In CNET: Internet. Retrieved from http://www.cnet.com/news/4-things-to-expect-from-google-in-2015/
Marketing Strategies and the Marketing Plan
Chapter 2 in our textbook contains a detailed description of a marketing plan. Review it carefully. This is what you will be asked to do for your own project. You will create a marketing plan based on the blueprint provided in the book. You can also look at the marketing plan outline on the QuickMBA site.
The logic of developing the marketing plan is exactly the same as any other plan:
- analyze the situation,
- decide on objectives,
- decide how to reach your objectives,
- decide on a particular tactical mix,
- identify timetables for implementation, and
- set controls (ways to know if you are achieving your goals).
Once you are done, you should make a straight forward summary of the whole plan so that a busy executive can read it quickly and know what you are suggesting. The summary should appear first in the plan document.
Because we are talking about marketing, the objectives should be marketing-related (typically, either in terms of market share or sales/profits). Reaching the objectives involves choosing the target market and positioning to it, and the tactical mix involves your familiar four Ps of the marketing decision variables:
- product (its quality, both concrete and abstract),
- price,
- promotion (how and where the product will be promoted, whether there will be sales promotions, and social media use), and
- distribution and supply chain management (which outlets you will use to market the product, and which types of processes are put into action).
Situation analysis involves understanding your strengths and weaknesses (i.e., internal company analysis), as well as the opportunities and threats (i.e., external market analysis) stemming from your customers, competition, and market environment.
A marketing plan describes a business's current position in the market place and its strategy for achieving its objectives over a certain period of time. The purpose of creating a marketing plan is to clearly show the steps you will take to achieve the business' marketing objectives. In other words, when you write your plan, explain how the prepared plan will enable to reach your target market and why it will work.
Please note that the plan must be written as a business document for business professionals. Do not use colloquialisms or informal language. Do not pretend this is a promotional brochure. Proofread very carefully for spelling, grammar, and language.
The plan has to be specific. Do not ever say anything like "We will carry out segmentation and target the appropriate segment with the right offer." Vague language like this will have a negative effect on your grade. Name the segment and describe exactly what you plan on doing.
You should follow the structure explained in the textbook (Ferrell Hartline and Hochstein, 2022, p. 37). Basically, you need to include the following components:
1. Executive Summary
This is a concise explanation of what you are trying to achieve and how. It is there so a busy executive can read it and know at a glance exactly what you are suggesting. This section is, by necessity, written last, because you have to summarize everything else in the plan. It is like the introduction to an English essay!
2. Situation Analysis
Describe the
- industry level analysis (including trends, developments, and economic outlook, as practical),
- competition (their positioning and branding strategies, their four Ps, and how can you compete against them), and
- customers (who they are, what motivates them to buy a product like yours, when they would buy them, and how would they use the product).
This section needs to be based in research. At Penn State University, you can find excellent industry reports in IBIS and other library sources, such as ProQuest and ABI_INFORM data banks (consult with the library if you need help using the databases).
You need to do both secondary (library) research and primary research (focus groups, customer surveys, and marketing analytics).
3. SWOT Analysis
This follows the previous section. A SWOT analysis summarizes your situation analysis in a simple matrix that makes it easy to decide what to do, which lucrative market opportunities to pursue, and how to pursue these opportunities.
4. Goals and Objectives
In the case of your class project, this section will probably be very short. You will need to come up with numerical estimates of how much you will sell within one year and later (annual planning period), medium (1 to 3 years), and long-term (5+ years). That estimate, of course, will come from the previous sections.
5. Marketing Strategy
This is where you explain exactly who you are targeting, your positioning or re-positioning strategy, your brand, what your brand is all about, and state your four Ps. This section needs to flow logically from previous sections. Include samples of your advertising in an appendix.
6. Action Programs
The action programs describe what you will do and when. For example, if your product is best rolled out for Christmas shopping, it has to be in stores by Black Friday at the latest, and advertising for it needs to have started a few weeks before. If you want to first start selling your fashion item in a few select major metropolitan areas and then expand, describe that. If you market children's toys, a majority of toys in the U.S.. are sold between September and mid-December. Therefore, you must start supplying toy stores in early September and engage your promotional strategies between the months of September and December to create public interest and desire for your toy product.
7. Budgets
At the very least, you should have a profit-and-loss statement that includes revenue, costs, and marketing expenses and still shows some profit, even if it doesn't start the first year. You need to operate within the budget set aside by the client.
8. Evaluation and Control Procedures
This section will address the question "How will you know that you are doing well?" In your case, this section will likely be rather short. You need to specify how the company will go about measuring whether its strategy works. In addition to straightforward financial considerations, you can suggest measuring the effectiveness of different activities (for example, identifying whether the advertising campaign resulted in brand awareness). Refer to what you learned in MKTG 342, Marketing Research. You will apply all the methods you learned in that course to measure and evaluate how well the business is doing.
9. Citations
Most marketing plans do not include citations, but this is a part of your coursework, so cite your sources in a proper manner.
References
Ferrell, O. C., Hartline, M. D., & Hochstein, B. W. (2022). Marketing strategy (8th ed.). Cengage Learning, Inc.
Group Marketing Plan
Group Setup
Students will be randomly assigned to a group in Lesson 2. Once the groups are formed, your group should decide which marketing plan you would like to work on. Once the decision is made, have one of your group members as the group leader, submit the chosen topic on behalf of your group by the end of Lesson 3. The marketing plan selection is on a first-come, first-served basis. If your group is interested in a topic that another group has already signed up, you can negotiate to change the title. However, you will need to inform the instructor no later than the end of Lesson 4.
For both case analysis assignment and marketing plan project, I urge you to make use of databases available through Penn State Libraries. You can access these databases from your home and/or office. The most important databases for our purpose are PROQUEST and ABI-INFORM. For industry level analysis, consult the Economic Intelligence Unit reports. In both case analysis and strategic marketing plan development, you are expected to integrate concepts and techniques of strategic marketing in text body.
Also, to help you with the development of a strategic marketing plan, please consult with the Marketing Plan Worksheet (Ferrell and Hartline, 2014). This is a very useful framework to be used.
Marketing Plan Topics
There will be seven marketing plan titles:
- Development of a Strategic Marketing Plan to Re-vitalize Downtown Middletown Businesses
- Development of a Strategic Marketing Plan for Harrisburg International Airport (HIA) to Improve Performance
- Positioning Harrisburg-York-Lancaster Triangle as a Place for Investment
- Marketing of the Amish County as a Viable Tourism Destination
- Development of a Strategic Marketing Plan for Hershey Entertainment
- Development of Strategic Marketing Planning for Pennsylvania Companies after Covid 2019 Epidemic
- Investigation of Household Energy Consumption Behavior in the State of Pennsylvania
Once the groups have been formed, you can see the current groups where you are enrolled using the Global Navigation Menu. You can start discussions within your group in Canvas. I suggest that you first introduce yourself to your other group members. Provide a little bit of background information about yourself and your time availabilities.
References
Ferrell, O. C., & Hartline, M. D. (2014). Marketing Strategy: Text and Cases (6th ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western, Cengage Learning. (Note: The marketing plan worksheet is adopted from the older edition of the textbook).