Assignment: Principle of Marketing
Start by reading and following these instructions:
1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.
2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.
3. Consider the course discussions so far and any insights gained from it.
4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources if needed, use APA style as required, and check your spelling.
Assignment: Draft vision deliverable
A board of executives from the firm and selected high-profile entrepreneurs, the Review Board, will be reviewing the work of the various teams each week. In an effort to make it easier for unbiased evaluations to be performed, you are ask to follow APA document guideline and produce a draft vision of 3 to 4 pages for this and subsequent deliverables.
For the first deliverable, address the following topics and answer the questions, but do it in a way that flows as a single integrated vision document. You will refine this vision and create other important deliverables during this course. You are encouraged to spend a few minutes looking for supporting material about business vision documents and leverage the best of those ideas as you produce yours.
a. Who are the potential customers and what is it that they are experiencing that will position them to be viable customers? What is there about these customers and their needs that are likely to support a successful business for a decade or more, assuming you can out-think and out-perform the competition?
b. What is the nature of the business in terms of the customer relationship? Is this a commodity product where price and convenience is critical, a luxury item where price is not as critical, or is this a product/service where there is an ongoing business relationship after the sale? Is this the kind of product or service where repeat business should be a significant source of income for the firm?
c. Do you envision the business as starting by targeting specific needs of a single target community (e.g. the target is San Francisco), targeting specific needs of a similar set of communities (e.g. the targets are rural professionals living more than an hour drive from a major city), targeting a specific age group or demographic, etc.? Consider the various marketing philosophies from the textbook, find one or a blend that suits you and use it to help you answer these questions.
d. Is your vision to become very profitable by means of stellar margins from a very satisfied but relatively small number of customers (e.g. a luxury brand), or do you see the firm being profitable by means of a much larger number of customers and with more modest margins? Support your position.
e. How will your firm remain successful in our changing world and with competitors coming at you from around the world? Maintaining an appropriate balance between doing today's business and preparing to become tomorrow's business is not easy and many firms end up being "one-trick ponies" and disappear after a just few years of what appeared then to be success. How you ensure that your firm won't be just another "one-hit wonder"?
f. What few key business-cultural aspects of your firm are important enough to you to make them a focus beyond profitability? How do these shape your business' mission and goals? What characteristics would you like your business to be known for as your legacy beyond basic business and professional ethics and other behaviors that society believes are important enough to be the basis for various laws? How important are cross-functional, collaborative, and team efforts? Do you feel strongly enough about these causes or beliefs that you would be willing to be less profitable in order to remain true to them? If so, how would you explain your rationale to a potential investor who is concerned about the long-term prospects of their investment? As a result, what marketing and selling philosophies are most compatible with your vision and why?
Start by reading and following these instructions:
1. Quickly skim the questions or assignment below and the assignment rubric to help you focus.
2. Read the required chapter(s) of the textbook and any additional recommended resources. Some answers may require you to do additional research on the Internet or in other reference sources. Choose your sources carefully.
3. Consider the discussion and the any insights you gained from it.
4. Create your Assignment submission and be sure to cite your sources, use APA style as required, check your spelling.
Assignment: Enhanced draft vision deliverable
Based on feedback from your previous draft and insight from this week's discussion, reading, and research, you have been asked to iteratively refine and enhance your draft vision document. It is critical that this enhanced deliverable flow nicely. Carefully reflect on the feedback you were provided and how you feel about making changes based on that feedback. Do not change your vision just because of the feedback if there was a failure to communicate your intent. Agreeing to every change request will not ensure your project success. If the feedback is not compelling to you, try to understand what might have been at the heart of the feedback and work to clarify your ideas and your rationale accordingly.
a. In your enhanced vision, be sure to expand your marketing concepts to include the relevant environment factors from your reading. Do any of these factors, including ethic and social responsibility, suggest specific strengths or weaknesses for your concept? Could some form of a SWOT analysis be useful?
b. If your original vision did not include consideration for the global marketplace, now is the right time to address it. If you did, when would "go global" make sense for the kind of business you are considering? Are there trends you see that suggest now is or is not the right time? Is it something that you would consider after some initial market success? Or do you think that new and emerging market countries would be more open to your ideas from the start due to the potential for more demand, more liberal laws and/or regulations, or some other marketing factor? Or are there issues that preclude your venture from "going global"? (Please recognize that even if your end-client product tends to be very local, the process of developing a local market and serving it well itself could be the product that has real global potential.)
Even though you may be covering more material in this deliverable, you are still asked to keep the total length in the range of 3 to 4 pages. This may require you to prioritize aspects of your message, recognize what is truly important, and discover ways to make your point more concise and invest your words in the document wisely.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.