BSBMKG609 Develop a Marketing Plan Assessment Task 1

• Not a fix for a failing business – franchising is not a solution to provide injections of capital from other people when a business is in difficulty. You should only go down the franchise route if you already have a successful business up and running.
• Costs – franchising your business will involve significant financial investment at the outset in order to get a successful franchise model in place for future growth of the business including investment in preparing legal documents, operations manuals, marketing materials and recruitment.
• Time – franchising will take a lot of time investment especially when initially setting up the franchise model. You will also have to take the time to ensure you attract the right franchisees and control what they do.
• Training and support – you will have to develop and deliver a suite of training and support for your franchisees to successfully sell your brand. Businesses need to have systems and procedures in place that can be copied by most people to run a successful business.

1. Recommend the opportunity that best addresses organisational objectives

The company need a joint venture that can help your business grow faster, increase productivity and generate greater profits. The company need to

• access to new markets and distribution networks
• increased capacity
• sharing of risks and costs with a partner
• access to greater resources, including specialised staff, technology and finance

Joint ventures often enable growth without having to borrow funds or look for outside investors. You may be able to use your joint venture partner's customer database to market your product, or offer your partner's services and products to your existing customers. Joint venture partners also benefit from being able to join forces in purchasing, research and development.

4. Develop a marketing mix strategy that fits within the capabilities and resources of the organisation

Discuss the strategy you will use on for Houzit.

Price - Medium to high

Place - The choice of distribution method will depend on a variety of circumstances. It will be more convenient for some manufacturers to sell to wholesalers who then sell to retailers, while others will prefer to sell directly to retailers or customers.

Product- The product has to have the right features - for example, it must look good and work well.

Promotion – advertisement and voucher , sales promotion which will attract the customer know their product and get new customer.

5. Describe how your strategies align with the strategic direction of the organisation, and give justifications for your selection

Sales strategy is to make ourselves known through mailings, print advertising, and personal contact to architects and contractors who are primarily involved with the design/construction of commercial development and luxury homes. Having a showroom will be a sales tool in itself. A showroom will give us exposure to the general public, new arrivals to the area, and construction professionals

Marketing Strategy

Houzit furniture is moving toward internal marketing control by establishing programs such as an in-house catalog publishing and distribution department, detailed customer service vehicles that will allow us to track the success of our marketing and sales, and further integration with established quality catalog vendors, such as Shaper Image.

Our target markets present great opportunities for company growth, as our niche is not at all saturated at this point. We will dominate the high-end office furniture market by stressing the quality in workmanship and materials of our product lines, keeping up with and integrating technological advances in the personal computing environment, and by increasing our market research and customer service in order to constantly satisfy our markets' needs.

The home ware furniture purchaser, small business owner, and corporate executive will greatly benefit from our quality products in terms of , comfort, and appreciation of the office environment. The key to reaching this market is to make them aware that our products are available. We do not need to convince them of anything but the assurance of quality in manufacturing and ergonomic design.

6. Detail a marketing performance review strategy using an appropriate tool (competitive analysis, life cycle model, value chain analysis, etc.) to review the performance of the organisation against marketing objectives.

Discuss the marketing performance review strategies above on how they evaluate the performance against marketing objectives

Competitive analysis

Ikea
Ikea is very big company and has so many type of furniture. It was one of the first, certainly the first we are aware of, to develop furniture and market through advertising in magazines and television. Today they are about twice our size. They have a very nicely done catalog and good relationships with two distributors.

Strengths: good marketing, strong advertising budget, relationships with distributors, strong direct sales.
Weaknesses: the product is more standardized, and of lesser quality, with less sense of design and materials and workmanship

Life cycle model

Furniture companies complied with these environmental standards through the development and marketing of less harmful products. As an instrument to gain competitive advantage, the furniture industry has adopted environmental product performance beyond mere environmental compliance. As a result today's environmental performance not only refers to the final product but the entire value chain along which a product is developed, manufactured, delivered, used, and retired.

Value chain analysis

Value chain analysis (VCA) has emerged since the 1990s as a novel approach for understanding how power, benefits and costs are embodied and distributed to various actors. The furniture industry demonstrates a long chain of production to consumption, from raw material producers (tree growers), semi-finished producers, finished product producers, and retailers to exporters.

7. Discuss the metrics to be used in measuring marketing performance.

Discuss 3 key areas:

1. Brand awareness
2. Surveys

Whether you conduct a survey by email, website or telephone, you can either ask existing customers how they heard of you or ask a random selection of people if they are familiar with your brand. The first approach will give you an understanding of how people hear about you, the second will give you an insight into the number of people that can recall your brand.

2. Look at website traffic

Measuring your website traffic over time can reveal insights into brand awareness, but it’s important you are looking in the right places. The direct channel in Google Analytics tracks the number of people who typed your URL into their address bar, used a browser bookmark, or clicked a link in an untracked email or offline document. Monitoring this over time will give you an indication of changes in brand awareness.

1. Market share

• Determine the period you want to examine for each company you are investigating.

In order to make sure you are making an apples-to-apples comparison, you must examine sales in a specific time period. You can examine the sales over the length of a quarter, a year, or over several years.

• Calculate the company's total revenue (also called total sales)

All publicly-traded companies must release quarterly or annual financial statements. These statements will include a record of all of the firm's sales, and may also include an itemized explanation of sales of specific product or service types within the footnotes of the financial statements..

1. Customer Satisfaction

Ways of measuring customer satisfaction include:

• Survey customers.
• Understand expectations.
• Find out where you are failing.
• Pinpoint specifics.
• Assess the competition.
• Try to measure the emotional aspect.
• Loyalty measurement.
• A series of attribute satisfaction measurement.

8. Detail the tactics necessary to implement the strategy you have outlined, including:
9. scheduling of activities to enact the strategy
10. costing
11. accountabilities and responsibilities
12. a plan for coordinating and monitoring scheduled activities including KPIs.

9. Outline any legal and ethical requirements that impact on the marketing activities

Pricing regulations

When you price your products or services or advertise a price, you need to comply with pricing regulations and display the price clearly and accurately.

Intellectual property

When you use another person's or business's intellectual property for the purposes of branding or selling, you need to comply with Intellectual Property (IP) regulations including trade mark laws.

Trade mark laws

When preparing your branding, business name or website name, you need to ensure aren't in breach Australian or international trade mark laws.

International regulations

When you export or expand overseas, it's important to comply with both Australian and international regulations including:

International pricing regulations

If you're considering exporting your products or services, ensure you're aware of any international regulations that may impact your pricing decisions.

10. Describe how the tactics fit within identified organisational resources and capabilities.

To determine your strategy, you must understand fully the internal and external environmental factors that affect you. With that understanding, you can identify your clear advantages and use these to be successful. From there, you can make informed choices and implement your strategy effectively.

So, strategy creation follows a three-stage process:

• Analyzing the context in which you're operating.

Analyze Your Organization

Firstly, examine your resources, liabilities, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. A SWOT Analysis is a great tool for uncovering what you do well and where you have weaknesses, providing that you use it rigorously. It's much easier to achieve your objectives when your strategy uses your strengths without exposing your weaknesses.

• Identifying strategic options.

Brainstorm Options

Use creativity tools like Brainstorming, Reverse Brainstorming and Starbursting to explore projects that you could run to develop competitive advantage. Guide your brainstorming with reference to the organization's mission statement, but, depending on your role in the organization, consider how far you should be constrained by this.

• Evaluating and selecting the best options.

Choose the Best Way Forward

With your evaluation complete, you now must choose the best strategic option or strategic options, making sure that you don't choose so many options that you spread your resources too thinly.

11. Conclusion - Summarize the report

Every company, from the smallest to the largest, should have a marketing plan. A marketing plan helps remove the fog and barriers to vision. Marketing plans help organizations to:

• Obtain a clear direction regarding how to get and keep customers;
• Become better at using strategy to build brand awareness;
• Sell their products and services easier;
• Address and identify potential problems; and
• Take advantage of new opportunities.

BSBMKG609 Develop a Marketing Plan Assessment Task 2