BUMKT 1501 Marketing Strategy Assignment Task 2:-Federation University Australia

Marketing Strategy

BUMKT 1501 Marketing Strategy Assignment

Details of task:The purpose of this assignment is for you to demonstrate your understanding of marketing theory and its application in practice. This assignment requires you to integrate marketing theory with a “real world” context. In doing so, it is designed to test your ability to apply relevant marketing concepts in a practical setting. The Muama Enence is a small, hand-held portable electronic device that can translate a language into more than 40 different languages. The original inventors originally designed it with holidaymakers and and business travellers in mind, but it soon became clear that in a multi-cultural market such as Australia, people from a wide range of backgrounds (e.g. customs officers, ambulance crews, social workers etc.) could also use it to solve language barriers. Currently Muama Enence has a monopoly over this market, so your (hypothetical) firm has given you the responsibility of coming up with a marketing strategy for your own portable-translator-device. The ultimate goal is for your own language-translator to compete with, and ultimately steal market share away from, Muama Enence. In order to do this, you will need to draw extensively on your knowledge and understanding of the BUMKT1501 course content.

BUMKT 1501 Marketing Strategy Assignment

Your marketing plan should cover the following topics:
1.What is the value proposition for your product? In other words, what benefits will it offer, and what “costs” are involved in buying/using it?
2. What elements of the Macro-Environment will have the biggest influence on your Marketing Strategy? Why?
3.Who is the target market for your product? Will you serve the same segments as Muama Enence, or will you instead focus on a specific segment and try to make that segment “your own”?
4.What is your positioning strategy for your product?Why did you choose that particular strategy? How does that compare with the positioning strategy used by Muama Enence?
5.What is your product strategy? This strategy should actually comprise a host of sub- strategies such as; (a) what product features will you offer and why? (b) what brand name will you give to the product and why?(c) what form will your product packaging take and why?
6.What is your price strategy?
7.What is your place strategy?
8.What is your promotion strategy?

Marking Criteria

The Report will be assessed using the four following criteria:
1. Is the primary focus of your Report on Marketing theory? To state the obvious, the whole point of this assessment is for you to demonstrate your understanding of Marketing theory. And of course, in order to do that, you must include it in your Report.
a. Make sure you read through the Lecture slides (particularly the “Food for thought” slides) and the Study Guides, because these will help you identify potentially relevant theory.
b. To show to the marker that you understand the theory you are discussing, remember to define key concepts before going on to explain how they will influence your marketing plan.
c. Make sure that theoretical sources such as your Marketing textbook dominate your research effort and referencing. Aim for at least 25 in-body references from your Marketing textbook. Please note: the Assessment 2 guidelines in your Course Description originally required that you use (and reference) at least 3 other marketing textbooks. However, due to the Covid-19 situation, this is no longer essential, and instead, basing all references on your textbook is enough to meet this criterion.
d. While some limited use of the Internet to source information about the
industry is recommended, please note that Internet sources such as Wikipedia, ‘marketingtutor.com’, ‘learnmba.com’ and any other similar sites are NOT credible academic sources and so should NOT be used.
e. Please also understand that of all the learning resources made available to you, the ONLY one that you can legitimately reference is the Textbook. This means, for example, that you can neither include material from, nor reference, the Lecture slides, Study Guides etc.
2.Practical understanding: would your strategy actually work in the real world? Have you made connections between different parts of the Report? No part of a marketing strategy operates independently from the other parts. Instead, early parts of the Report should be reflected in later parts, while later parts should be justified by earlier parts. As a simple example, if your Value Proposition is based on providing ‘value’ by minimising money and effort ‘costs’, this should be reflected later in your Report in such topics as your Product Strategy (e.g. easy to use features that reduce the ‘effort’ involved in using it), Place Strategy (e.g. can buy it online) and Price Strategy (e.g. cheaper than the Muama Enence). Similarly, when it comes to discussing your Price Strategy, link it back to your Value Proposition by highlighting that you have opted to charge a lower price than Muama Enence (e.g. a ‘market penetration pricing’ strategy) because it is consistent with your Value Proposition of competing on the basis of lower costs.
4. Is your work free of spelling, grammar, punctuation and presentation errors?

BUMKT 1501 Marketing Strategy Assignment

An example
Combining the four previous points into a Report is much easier than you might think. Please let me illustrate, using the Product Strategy section of the Report as the example.

Product Strategy

A product is anything of value that can be offered to consumers (Grewal et al., 2018). A Product Strategy covers a wide range of topics, including brand name, packaging, labels and product features (Grewal et al., 2018). Due to the fact that the value proposition for this strategy is based on benefits relating to Australian patriotism and protecting the environment, all of these topics will feature in the Product Strategy. For example, in order to cater to patriotism, the brand name ‘Translator Mate’ has been specifically chosen due to the connection of the word ‘mate’ to Australian culture. This will be a particularly important part of the overall strategy because, as Grewal et al. (2018, p. 249) state, “branding … provides a way for a firm to differentiate its product offerings from that of its competitors”. This brand name will help identify the translator as being Australian-made, and in doing so, help position it against (Grewal et al., 2018, p. 189) the American-made Muama Enence. In terms of the packaging, it will be green and gold in colour to emphasise the made-in-Australia theme. To further reinforce this, the product label will clearly state that the translator is “Made in Australia”. The product features of the translator will also specifically cater to serving the patriotic benefit. This will involve including Australian slang as a ‘novelty’ language. As can be seen, of the three product components – core, actual and associated (Grewal et al., 2018, p. 243) – the Product Strategy, by focusing on brand name, packaging and product features, is focused on the “Actual Product”.

Dissecting the example
:- Please note: this is just a brief extract from the Product Strategy; it is not a complete Product Strategy. Your strategy would need to be larger than this short example.
:- Please don’t be put off by this example. It was actually written by one of your lecturers. This is not the standard required to pass Assessment Task 2. It is written to the standard of a “High Distinction”. So please just see it for what it is: an example of how to; (1) include theory; (2) relate that theory to your translator; and (3) make connections to other parts of your Report.
:- Note how the example is focused on Marketing theory from your textbook, covering such concepts as value, benefits, brand name, packaging, labels, product features and positioning.
:- Note how, in order to convey that the writer actually understands the theory they are discussing, they define key concepts before launching into their discussion of them. In the case of the extract, the relevant example can be found in the very first sentence.
:- Note how the product strategy does not work in isolation. In the example provided, it is clear that these are NOT just random strategies. Instead, they have clearly been justified based on their connection to the Value Proposition, the analysis of the Marketing Environment and the Positioning strategy.
:- Note how in order to illustrate their understanding of what a brand name might need to extract provides an example of a hypothetical brand name (e.g. the “Translator Mate”). In doing so, it helps satisfy the criterion, “would your strategy work in the real world”?
:- Note how easy it is to meet the criterion of “25 in-body references”. In this one paragraph alone, there are 5 references. Also note how a reference can help highlight to the marker the inclusion of Marketing theory. For example: “This brand name will help identify the translator as being Australian-made, and in doing so, help position it against (Grewal et al., 2018) the American-made Muama Enence”.
:- Note how there are no spelling or grammar mistakes. Also, note how the extract is written without first-person references such as “I”, “we” and “you”. First-person references should NOT be used in a Business Report. One thing I must point out though is that the referencing provided in the extract is not 100% correct. In reality, page numbers are only required for direct quotes, whereas I have provided them for a couple of other references as well. The reason for that was simply to highlight to you exactly where in the Textbook the theory in question came from.

BUMKT 1501 Marketing Strategy Assignment

Target Market
Segmentation refers to the process of grouping consumers on some common basis, such as where they live, their age and gender, or the benefits they derive from a good or service (adapted from Grewal et al., 2018). There are five methods for segmenting a market: geographic, demographic, psychographic, benefits and behavioural (Grewal et al., 2018). Of these five options, this strategy will use geographic segments and benefits segments to help define its target market. Geographic segmentation refers to “the grouping of consumers on the basis of where they live” (Grewal et al., 2018, p. 170). Given that a key benefit of Translator Mate is to provide benefit in the form of appealing to Australians’ patriotic nature, the target market will be those consumers living in …

Dissecting this example
:-This short extract ticks all the same boxes as the previous example, but also includes one additional strength. The MOST important marking criterion for this Assessment Task is that the primary focus of your Report must be on Marketing theory. This example does that by showing to the marker that the student understands that there are actually five methods for segmenting the market, and then begins to justify why they have focused on just two. It is a much better option than simply launching into a discussion on geographic segments and benefits segments, without acknowledging that the student understands that there were other options, but has made an informed choice to focus on just the two most important ones.

BUMKT 1501 Marketing Strategy Assignment

There are three key resources:

1. Your prescribed textbook.
2. The PowerPoint Lecture slides, in particular, the ‘Food for Thought’ slides.
3. The Study Guides.

It is important that students understand that the Lecture Slides provided on Moodle are NOT the original slides provided by the Publisher. Instead, your Teaching Team worked very hard to customise these slides to your specific needs. This not only involved deleting irrelevant and unhelpful slides, and adding additional content of our own on important topics, but also creating the “Food for Thought” slides. These slides were added with the specific intention of highlighting potential Marketing theory you can draw on for your Report. Why? Because of the four marking criteria, it is by far the most important. Remember, the Report is NOT about a language translator; that’s simply the assignment context. Instead, the Report is ALL about you showing that you understand and can apply Marketing theory, and the ONLY way to do that is to make extensive use of it in your Report. To further help you with this, the Study Guides also contain tips highlighting potential Marketing theory you can draw on for your Report. So while there may not be much “quantity” in the fact that you only need to use three study resources for Assessment Task 2, there is plenty of “quality” in the “food for thought” exercises and the Study Guides in the way they highlight the specific parts of your Textbook to focus in on.