Executive Summary
The paper helped in evaluating a marketing plan for a particular service namely Student success online service which will provide a scanning service for digitizing fragile photos, a tasty and nutritious snack product and a highly durable mountain bike. It has been analyzed that the service is needed to help college students who need a sturdier bike for rocky terrain, for those who need a way to save old photographs by scanning them and for those students who require a convenient and healthy snack (Martínez-Sala, Monserrat-Gauchi & Campillo Alhama, 2017). The service will be made, especially for college students like mountain-biking enthusiasts, individuals who seek to protect fragile family photos digitally along with those parents who seek to buy snacks for their children. It is seen that the company is a start-up company who is preparing itself to introduce new and innovative products within the market. The purpose of this marketing plan to provide more marketing support while launching a particular product and make an international company plan to launch a new product within the United States. It has been observed that the stakeholders of the company are internship firms, colleges and universities. The primary objective of this particular service is to help existing and new college students to gain success by facilitating reliable access, resources and information to the real world. It has been noticed that the mission statement of this service is to help college students to gain success in their career goals and academic performance. This service will be developed to help college members, professors, clinical physiologists, firms, advisers and students to connect and exchange information (Muzellec, Ronteau & Lambkin, 2015). Moreover, the paper also helped in determining the marketing objectives of the service is to attract 600,000 students after the first campaign and partner with 4000 colleges and universities during the first month. It provided a SWOT analysis which determines the strengths of the services such as accessible, highly specialized professional and cost advantage. However, its weaknesses are lack of credibility along with financial limitations, while the opportunities are implementing effective marketing strategies and specialized software to protect consumer’s confidentiality, security and privacy. Meanwhile, intense competition within the market may threaten firm’s profitability and productivity (Wirtz & Zeithaml, 2018).
Furthermore, the paper determines the fact that the website’s features and home page will be designed in such a way that supports or reflects different lifestyle, language and cultures. It stated that self-concept and motives are regarded as the major factors for college students to engage them towards the company’s website (Ananda, Hernández-García & Lamberti, 2016). It has been evaluated that political system, technology factor and innovation will influence the buying decision of the firms and universities. It revealed the fact that purchasing centres for the marketing plan are hiring managers and human resource managers that recruit employees to their firm. The paper considered that firm might minimize the issue by implementing other securities, confidentiality and strong cybersecurity that will prevent its consumer’s resources and data. However, it has been noticed that the firm may reduce the discrepancy and difference among different cultures by implementing product adaption and dual adaptation. For the marketing campaign, the company is going to use different apps, computers and mobile devices (Snyder, Witell, Gustafsson, Fombelle & Kristensson, 2016). In terms methodology, primary research method will be used along with internal data to support the hypothesis. For targeting two or more segments differentiation strategy will be used that will help the website in fulfilling customer’s needs as per their budget and demand. The paper stated the fact that both psychographic and demographic segmentation will help the company in targeting college students under the age group of 16-26 by considering individuals social activities, attitude value and life-style. Moreover, for the business market, the company will emphasize technology firms as well as service business centres as they are highly interested in working with universities and students (Sharma & Lijuan, 2015). The paper demonstrated an understanding that the service will be useful for business to sponsor new researches and technologies, recruit new graduate students and advertise new products on social media. Price discrimination and variable pricing will be used by the company to differentiate itself from its competitors. Furthermore, to reach different consumer base, the company will use a direct channel along with persuasive and informative advertising methods as well as different social media platforms. Therefore, all these strategies will help the company to create an effective marketing plan and target huge consumer-base.
References
Ananda, A. S., Hernández-García, Á., & Lamberti, L. (2016). N-REL: A comprehensive framework of social media marketing strategic actions for marketing organizations. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 1(3), 170-180.
Martínez-Sala, A. M., Monserrat-Gauchi, J., & Campillo Alhama, C. (2017). The relational paradigm in the strategies used by destination marketing organizations. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 72, 374-396.
Muzellec, L., Ronteau, S., & Lambkin, M. (2015). Two-sided Internet platforms: A business model lifecycle perspective. Industrial Marketing Management, 45, 139-150.
Sharma, G., & Lijuan, W. (2015). The effects of online service quality of e-commerce Websites on user satisfaction. The Electronic Library, 33(3), 468-485.
Snyder, H., Witell, L., Gustafsson, A., Fombelle, P., & Kristensson, P. (2016). Identifying categories of service innovation: A review and synthesis of the literature. Journal of Business Research, 69(7), 2401-2408.
Wirtz, J., & Zeithaml, V. (2018). Cost-effective service excellence. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 46(1), 59-80.
