Marketing for Entrepreneurial Firms

Assignment: Develop a strategic plan to develop and market a new service of your choice

You are required to submit your assignment in report form. The written report should
cover the following areas:

• Brief description of new service
• Marketing strategy
• Objectives
• Segmentation and positioning
• Environmental/external opportunity analysis
• Service development
• Service launch
• Communication and key marketing techniques
• Critical reflection to include strengths and weaknesses of choices and alternatives

This assignment provides an opportunity for students to apply their knowledge and
understanding of aspects of marketing strategy to a real world situation. The report
should draw on a range of information sources (e.g. books, academic journals, company reports, reports in magazines/press/trade press, lecture notes etc.)
You should employ appropriate conceptual concepts, theories and frameworks to analyse and support your plan and inform your choices. You should critically discuss conceptual perspectives them when appropriate. You are advised against heavy usage of websites.

The report itself should have a clear logical and well developed line of argument.
Remember however that it is a report and not an essay. Credit will be given for logical structuring of the information. The report should include scholarly
sources, as one of the key challenges of the assignment is to use conceptual material covered in the module to inform your understanding of the practice of marketing by entrepreneurs and SMEs. Detailed footnotes should be used to demonstrate engagement with the relevant academic literature, including reasons for choices between alternative theories, framework, etc., used for the analysis.

Remember that only about one quarter of expected workload of 150 hours is spent in
formal sessions; a considerable amount of work expected outside those and the
assessment is graded accordingly.

The information required for this project can be collected from published sources, but
you will need to use your initiative in searching for this information. The e-library
gateway gives you access to an extensive collection of databases containing business related articles. In addition to searching the scholarly marketing literature, the following may be relevant:
• Mintel Market Intelligence Reports
• Keynote Reports
• Marketing Week
• The Economist
• Financial Times

It is not be necessary to contact companies (e.g., potential competitors) directly,
although use can be made of their published materials.

Collecting information is important but you should be aware that you will be assessed
not only on the appropriateness and quality of the information you have collected but also on the way you have interpreted and used that information.

Submission of coursework

All coursework should have a Business School assessed coursework cover sheet
attached and two copies should be formally submitted to the Postgraduate Post Box
(and not directly to the Postgraduate Office Reception) by 2PM, 15 January 2014. In
addition, could you please send a soft copy of your coursework to my email address
If coursework is submitted late without sufficient reason it should be marked in the
normal way and a penalty then applied. The standard University penalty for late
submission should be 5% absolute (i.e. 5 marks on the 0-100 scale) per working day
(ie excluding Saturday or Sunday), until the mark reaches zero. Should a student,
owing to exceptional circumstances, be likely to miss a deadline then the situation
should be discussed as early as possible with the Business School Student Support
Officer.

In preparing your report for submission, the following guidelines apply:
• The report should be approximately 3500 words (including footnotes, but
excluding bibliography and appendices) and not exceed 3500 words.
• You should submit two copies of your report and e-mail a soft copy to the module coordinator (Helen Perks)
• The report should be word-processed, page-numbered and written in report writing
style: i.e. it should have a title page, table of contents, management
summary (max 1 page), main body of report (covering introduction, all areas
mentioned above), followed by references and appendices. The text should be
organised in logical sections and subsections, and have a page numbered
table of contents. Please remember the word count does not include the
bibliography and the appendices.
• All student coursework should be properly referenced. Standards of academic
integrity are expected to be upheld by all students at all times. This means that
you must ensure that you do not use the words or ideas of another person
without proper acknowledgement of that source. This is very important because
plagiarism is an academic offence for which there are severe penalties. (See
MSc Programme Student Handbook and Course Syllabus and Assessment
Regulations 2013/2014 for further details).
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