Description

Marketing Plan Overview

What is the Marketing Plan about?

You will be creating a new product and an associated plan for how it will be launched.  The plan will include a detailed description of the product and the rest of its marketing mix (the price, how it will be promoted, and how it will be distributed to the customer).  Before you can plan all the details about your marketing mix, you will need to do some research.  You will need to learn about such things as your competition, what your customers want, and what the trends are that would affect your business.  This research is done first (Part 1 of the Plan), then you can create the details of your product and the rest of the marketing mix.

How do we get started?

You begin your plan by deciding what kind of business you will be in.  You might decide to be an existing firm that will be creating a new product to add to your current list of products.  You might decide to be a brand new firm that will have the new product as your only product (though you must decide at the beginning what type of product you will create).  Here are some examples of products that students have successfully created in their marketing plans:

·         Computer training for Seniors (as a brand new firm)

·         Healthy dried fruit snack (as Frito-Lay)

·         Student e-reader with textbooks already pre-loaded (as a brand new firm)

More information is found at the end of this overview under the title: Picking your company and product

What do we submit?

On the due dates, you will submit each part of the Marketing Plan submit a copy to your professor. About Part 1 of the Plan

This part of the plan will mostly consist of research.  You will be looking for good information (that means not from Wikipedia or any social media like facebook) to complete the parts of the table that follows this Overview.  You must provide the source for every piece of information that you include.  We will use MLA format for citing the source. 

The Format for the report

The format of the report can be done 2 ways.  You can simply use the table below and “fill in the blanks”.  As an alternative, you may create your own report BUT the titles must be exactly the same as the ones used in the table below, and in the same order.  Some subsections of the report will only need a paragraph or 2 to complete the information, while others may need several pages to cover the topic appropriately.  Try to avoid quoting your source word-for-word (avoid “cut and paste”).  You should summarize what you have learned in your own words.  Of course this still means that you include the source of the information in MLA format.

More about Picking your company and product

You may select an existing firm (eg. Sony), or you can be a brand new firm in an existing industry (eg. a new firm competing against Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo etc.  in electronic games).  You do not need to select your specific product immediately, but you do need to pick a direction for your research to proceed.  If you decide to be a brand new firm, then you are the firm’s employees, and your skills and resources of the firm are your  skills and resources.