The student is expected to recruit a local client organization for the purposes of constructing a marketing plan; this client organization may be public or private, profit or not-for-profit, product- or service-oriented, the business you own or work for — whatever.
BUT THIS MUST BE A. REAL COMPANY THAT YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED CONTACT WITH (i,e, one you or your partner works for), or B. A REAL COMPANY WITH SUBSTANTIAL PUBLICLY-AVAILABLE EVIDENTIARY TRAIL (should you choose this option , a minimum of twenty citations must accompany your paper) Since you will need SOME financial and other quantitative data to complete the marketing plan, you must ascertain whether these are readily available and/or willingly provided by the client: marketing plans not including ANY of said data will be substantially penalized.
Ask first. The form of the marketing plan is as detailed in the appendix of your text, and further elaborated in the exercise of week three.
Materials described week by week throughout the course will be helpful. The first half of the suggested Cohen supplement book, for example, contains many tools which may be used in analyzing the company at hand; the second half contains many samples of marketing plans for a number of different types of organizations.
These projects should be done individually or in groups of two students (no more). Those planning to work in pairs must let the instructor know by the end of the third week. The output will be a paper and a PowerPoint-based overview presentation of the plan available for peer scrutiny and comment during the final weeks of class. The paper should be approximately 12-15 double-spaced pages in length with regards to text. Supporting exhibits, tables, graphs, documents should be provided in an appropriately-referenced appendix, and does not count toward the 12-15 page count.
This appendix is also the appropriate place for including any support materials derived from the workbook exercises/tools found in Cohen or another marketing plan guide. All text and supporting graphics must be part of one integrated document. You must provide the instructor Word or pdf of the paper and the PowerPoint you uses in the ScreenPal presentation, delivered with the subject line “Online 5410 Plan (your last name).” A presentation should be recorded on ScreenPal/Screencast-O-Matic, which provides free access on their website. As the free version limits the number of minutes of presentations, the student should vacate his/her introduction video before making the term project overview video The link should be placed in the appropriate CANVAS discussion board thread in the penultimate week of class (see Schedule for details), for comment by other students.
It is meant to be an overview of your project, lasting 5-7 minutes, and need not be as extensive as the paper. If there are two of you working on the project, you may each post your part separately. NO material should be used without appropriate referencing. Copying material from the internet or any other sources (including marketing plans turned in by other students in the past) without documentation of the original source constitutes plagiarism and will result in a minimum of a failing grade for the course. Plagiarism refers not just to the copying of sources in their entirety, but also to pieces thereof and/or pastiche created from numerous sources.
Do not represent the work of others as your own. This project is expected to be an ORIGINAL work. Plagiarized material will result in a failing grade for each of the team members. One of the many aspects of the marketing plan analysis is the proper situating of the client company in its environment.
You are required to use AT LEAST two financial ratios in your marketing plan, and compare the client company to other similar companies based on those ratios, and incorporate that in the SWOT analysis.
You are also required to have at least one self-prepared, original forecast in your marketing plan, and incorporate that forecast into the analysis. Be especially careful when discussing the target market; some means by which you may understand and/or describe your target market follow from tools lectures and exercise during the semester. You can pick somthing out of STOCKTON CALIFORNIA
