Project 4: Developing and Implementing a Marketing Plan
Step 4: Prepare a Situation Analysis Report
Required Readings
Chapters 1, 3, & 14
Lancaster, G., & Massingham, L. (2018). Essentials of marketing management (2nd ed.). Routledge
INBOX: 1 New Message
Subject: Company Case File & Questions to ConsiderFrom: Jillian Best, CEO, MCSTo: TeamHi again. I wanted to provide you with the company case file and some pertinent questions for you to consider while you work on your B2B marketing plan.
As part of the preparation necessary to complete your business-to-business marketing plan, you and your team will need to do in-depth research on your client’s company, including its operations, global reach, and range of offerings.
By the end of Week 8, I need you to produce a situation analysis report explaining your team’s findings on the company. Be sure to include a value proposition, essentially the promise that is made to the customer, explaining the reason a customer purchases a product or uses a service (i.e., the value that a company delivers to its customers).
Start by reading the attached case file and be sure to consider the following questions while you do additional research:
- Where is the company headquartered?
- What are the company’s major products and/or services?
- What is the company’s annual revenue in dollars, and what is its annual production in units?
- Does the company own its own facilities or does it subcontract manufacturing to others?
- Who are the company’s major suppliers of raw materials or parts, and where are they located?
- What is the distribution of the company’s workforce by country?
- How does the company differentiate its offering in its highly competitive markets?
- Does the company have exclusive marketing or distribution agreements or partnerships?
- Who are the company’s major global and US customers?
- What benefits does the company offer to its customers?
- Who are the company’s major global and US competitors?
When developing your situation analysis, you should also understand the importance of vision and mission statements and then research the company’s own vision and mission statements.
Write a four-page document detailing the main findings of your research about your client, including its mission and vision statement. Submit your document to your team’s study group.
That’s it for now,Jillian
Attachments:
In the next step, you will complete your situation analysis by conducting an environmental scan that takes a comprehensive look at the many factors that you need to consider, exploit, or defend against in your marketing plan. This situation analysis will be incorporated into your B2B marketing plan later in this project, along with deliverables from the upcoming steps.
Project 4: Developing and Implementing a Marketing Plan
Step 5: Conduct an Environmental Scan
As a member of the business development team for this project, you use quantitative and qualitative market information to make important decisions and set the direction of the marketing plan. As you continue to work on your situation analysis report, your team will use the following tools to conduct an environmental scan, the foundation on which a solid marketing plan is built.
Tools for Environmental Scan
Company-Specific Analysis (internal)
- SWOT analysis—A SWOT analysis is a planning and brainstorming tool that helps a company evaluate its projects and formulate its business plans. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You will use this tool to identify and analyze the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses as well as its external opportunities and threats. The results of this analysis may help the company improve its business or forecast how a new product or service will perform (Harmon, 2016).
Industry, Market, and Customer Analysis (external)
- PESTEL analysis—A PESTEL analysis (sometimes called PEST analysis) enables the company to identify, analyze, and monitor the political, economic, social, technological, legal (including regulatory), and environmental factors that may affect its operations (Frue, 2017).
- Porter’s five forces analysis—Porter’s five forces analysis is a framework that can help the company understand the competitive forces at play in its industry. These forces may influence how economic value is divided among the company’s competitors in the industry (Porter, 2008).
References
Frue, K. (2017). Why do PEST analysis for your business? Retrieved from http://pestleanalysis.com/
Harmon, A. (2016). SWOT analysis. Salem Press Encyclopedia [online]. Retrieved from Research Starters, Ipswich, MA.
Porter, M. E. (2008). The five competitive forces that shape strategy. HarvardBusiness Review, 86(1), 78–93.
Research your industry and its market trends in the United States and identify market opportunities, threats, and the company’s major global competition. Then conduct the SWOT, PESTEL, and Porter’s five forces analyses on your client’s company. These tools should allow you to analyze the company’s internal environment, customers, and macro-environment (external environment), and to answer the following questions in your situation analysis report:
- Which elements have the biggest impact on the company’s success?
- What factors affect the company’s customers (other businesses)?
Deliverable: Your final situation analysis by the end of Week 8 should include a four-page overview of your research findings and a ten-page review of your environmental scan. The completed situation analysis report should be 14 pages, excluding cover page, the reference list, and appendices. Any tables, graphs, and figures should be included as appendices. Your report should have one-inch margins and be double spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font. The report should be organized using headings and subheadings to improve its readability.
Support your work with scholarly sources and reliable nonscholarly sources such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Barrons.com, Morningstar.com, Money, Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review, as well as the UMGC Library databases such as Hoover’s and ABI/INFORM. All sources need to be cited using APA formatting, both within the text and in the reference list.
By the end of Week 8, submit your situation analysis report to your team’s study group.
In the next step, you will start a market analysis report.