Final Project Part II
Complete the Marketing Plan Exercises at the end of each assigned chapter. These exercises will be the building blocks for your final project, a marketing plan. You will do each exercise on the same enterprise. Your enterprise strategy may be: 1) real, emerging, or imaginary; 2) product or service oriented; and 3) for profit or non-profit. The target market may be anywhere in the life cycle from innovation to maturity. Read each Marketing Plan Exercise description in its entirety, below is a brief description of what is required.
The enterprise is a sporting goods retailer store called Blue Skys. This clothing store sells athletic clothing, sports clothing, outdoors clothing, etc.
Chapter 4: Conduct macro-level market and industry analyses of the market offering on which your plan is based
Chapter 5: Prepare a detailed plan for conducting the primary research required to complete your final marketing plan.
In addition to the requirements above, your paper:
Must be double-spaced and 12 point font.
Must be formatted according to APA style.
Must reference two scholarly sources in addition to the textbook.
Must include a reference page written in APA format.
Chapter 4 = For the market offering on which your marketing plan or consulting project is based, use Internet and other available secondary resources to conduct macro-level market and industry analyses. Your analyses should include a macro trend analysis encompassing all relevant macro trend categories and should uncover quantitative data that provides evidence of the size and growth rate of the overall market, as well as qualitative data regarding the five forces. You should also identify, if you can, the few critical success factors that apply in your industry.
Your analyses should meet the following tests:
The source for each item of data or each trend should be cited, with a reference list at the end. Trade associations and/or trade magazines should typically be among the citations.
Your macro trend analysis should cover any of the six macroenvironmental categories that are relevant and should prioritize their importance to your business.
Your evidence of market size and growth rate should, ideally, indicate market size using multiple measures, such as number of potential customers, aggregate revenue of the market, and aggregate units of the good or service consumed by the market.
Your five forces analysis should draw evidence-based conclusions as to the favorability of each of the five forces and of the overall attractiveness of your industry.
You should draw a summary conclusion about the attractiveness of the overall market and the industry at the macro level.
Critical success factors should be just a few and might be inferred from trade magazine articles for the industry in question.
Chapter 5 = Prepare a detailed plan for conducting the primary research required to complete your project.
The research plan needs to do three things:
Precisely spell out the research objectives the research is intended to meet.
Design the research to get you there. Identify your methods, your sample, and any statistics (means, etc.) you will employ. Prepare drafts of questionnaires, guides for focus group sessions or in-depth interviews, plans for how you will conduct observational research, etc.
Describe how the combination of your secondary research and your planned primary research will lead to your estimate of target market size and your sales forecast for your marketing plan. Precisely spell out the mathematics that will do this, connecting it to specific secondary data or specific answers to questions or observations from your primary data.
Your research design should clearly identify and satisfy your research objectives, and appropriate qualitative and/or quantitative research should be competently designed, using what you learned in previous coursework or any supplementary readings necessary.
