Assignment 2: Positioning and mix development
Description/Focus: Client evaluation and marketing planning.
Value: 45% of unit total
Due date: Sunday, Week 12
Length: 3000 (max) words (excluding references)
General focus
The assignments for MKT503 Clients & Markets involve a real life case study, which enables you to apply your newly acquired understanding of marketing and customer behaviour to the development of appropriate marketing strategies and marketing initiatives, in both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) contexts.
The Company
During the unit the teaching team has provided you with insights into a company’s market situation, its B2C and B2B customer segments, and some of the challenges that it faces.
Assignment description
In Assignment 1 you identified one specific B2B and one specific B2C niche market segment for the company to target. Assignment 2 continues on directly from Assignment 1 and moves to the positioning and marketing mix planning stages of the segmentation process.
In Assignment 2 you need to describe the behaviour of your chosen segments in detail using the psychology concepts and theory covered in the unit. You then make recommendations for the marketing mix that clearly link to this understanding of buyer behaviour.
More specifically the assignment will:
• Develop understanding of the relevance of psychology, buying behaviour and marketing theory
• Help you appreciate the practical application of theory and its relevance to designing an effective marketing mix
• Require the concepts discussed in the course to be related to the marketing mix in order to achieve appropriate marketing objectives
• Help you to distinguish between the various internal and external influences that affect buyer behaviour and explain the likely responses to different marketing stimuli by customers in a specific marketing situation
Specific assignment tasks
In middle weeks of this unit (lessons 4 to 9) you are introduced to the key areas of psychology that influence and help to explain buying behaviour, with the last three lessons reiterating the application of this buyer behaviour understanding to effective marketing mix development.
This assignment seeks should reinforce your learning about the theories and concepts covered, and provides an opportunity to apply them in a real world B2C and B2B marketing context.
The assignment is flexible in that you can also choose which particular aspects of theory from the unit and the marketing mix elements that you wish to focus on. For example, you may take themes from all the core theoretical areas and illustrate an application from each, or you might choose to focus on just one or two areas in more detail. Furthermore you may decide to make recommendations for all, or just selected elements of the marketing mix.
More specifically this assignment requires you to complete a customer behaviour evaluation and make marketing mix recommendations for your:
• B2B target niche market (approx. 1500 words max)
• B2C target niche market (approx. 1500 words max)
To do this effectively you will provide a detailed description of the buying behaviour associated with your target customers using the key concepts and theories covered in the unit, namely:
• Buyer decision making processes and models
• Customer motivation
• Perception and the attention gate
• Customer knowledge and learning
• Group and social influences
• Personality, self-concept & emotion
• Customer attitudes
You then make recommendations for the marketing mix that are clearly linked to and build upon an understanding of buyer behaviour.
Solution
Positioning and mix development
B2B target niche market
B2B marketing alludes to the techniques and capabilities employed by organizations to sell products and services to other companies or business (Brennan, Canning & McDowell, n.d.). The critical part in B2B marketing is that all the effort directed towards marketing must consider several target audiences within a single enterprise. the reason why this is essential is because many business executive or director are usually involved in making decisions as far as purchasing is concerned. Furthermore, many of the B2B marketing techniques must be able to accommodate long term transactions due to the long decision-making process involved.
Generally, it is equally important of business to establish value of the products or the services especially if they are entering new markets. Recent research indicates the close to 90% of B2B business require economic approval (Brennan, Canning & McDowell, n.d.). Product promotion in terms of its usability as well as simple integration in the business are major components in the B2B marketing strategy. While approaching a potential purchasing company for a product pitch, one should emphasize on flexibility of the product and possibility of product customization. The aim is to capitalize on the idea that many businesses strive to be unique and hence they might require unique products and services that suites their needs. Considering all the above issues and many more social media appears to be the top choice of a B2B marketing strategy.
Social media
Over the years social media marketing has proven to be an effective B2B marketing platform (., 2017). With this kind of platform, it is necessary to select the target market in the initial marketing stages. For an effective B2B marketing strategy, the marketers should carefully consider the size of the enterprise as well as the industry. Budgets and revenues are also important factors that should be considered…………….To access the rest of the solution for $10, please click on the purchase button.
