Defining your brand

Within the Marketing Strategy section of your marketing plan you should clearly define your company or product/service brand. The brand will represent your identity as it will be perceived by the audience so it is extremely important to pay very attention in clearly identifying a good, clear brand concept at this stage of the marketing plan.

A good starting point to know how to define your brand is by looking through your mission and objectives also defined in this section of the marketing plan. Such goals and principles will dictate the attributes of your brand – are you looking to be the most exclusive? The fastest? The cheapest? The most consumer oriented? The highest quality provider? – Whatever you define and see your company as is your brand.

Once you are sure about all the characteristics associated to the brand you should then consider the company’s core values which might influence the way you shape your brand and present it to the public. By this I mean, values such as corporate responsibility, honesty, integrity, efficiency, corporate sustainability and environmentally friendly policies, amongst others. Those that clearly define the way you are planning to conduct business, should be combined with the company’s characteristics to create a cohesive bond which will then be communicated to the public as your brand.

The name you give to the brand which may or may not be the same as your company name (for example under Procter & Gamble you have several brand names including Pantene, Fairy, Pampers, etc. for each different product line) should be defined alongside the company image and the product or service it will be associated with. For example, it may not be a good idea to name a high technology computer provider as “Friendly computers” as for this type of business it will be more relevant to the consumer to get across characteristics such as efficiency, advanced technology and fast systems other than anything to do with friendship and kindness. “Friendly computers” might be a more appropriate name for children’s computers though, as not only the name is appealing to the parents and children but the word “friendly” can also be associated to user-friendly computers which will be beneficial for children users.

Good brand names will effectively build a connection between the brand personality as it is perceived by the target audience and the actual product or service itself. You can keep in mind that some of the most successful brand names are those who had such strong presence in the market that consumers started associating its name as a generic term for a product or service. Examples of these are brand names such as “Post-it”, “Kleenex” or “Tupperware” which are names used to represent all sticky paper notes, facial tissue or plastic containers respectively.

This brand will be representative of what will differentiate you from your competitors so, once it is established, you must stay true to it. All marketing activities you define from this point onwards in your marketing plan must be consistent with getting across the brand image, or the way you want your target market to see you. This is when the definition of a concise integrated communications plan will come into place as you continue writing your plan. Please note that while thinking about your communications strategy you never lose sight of who you are as per your brand definition so you don’t fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. Your brand will represent your niche in the market and will be your biggest selling point so make sure you will stick your actions to what you define in the plan as this will be a great tool to guide you through the brand implementation. After all, your brand implementation will ultimately determine your failure or success.

Are you a marketing student?

As an undergraduate or postgraduate marketing student, in various occasions you will be asked to elaborate marketing plans or will be involved in even more complex projects which, in order to be fully prepared need to include a marketing plan. Whenever you have several projects to be concluded within a short period of time or you are not sure of how best to start producing your plan, the “Marketing Plan Writer” services are here to support you. I will help with the research and production of a marketing plan SPECIFIC TO YOUR PROJECT where you can be based to carry out your own work before delivering it to your teachers. I do not incentive plagiarism therefore, I provide you with the full structure and key topics related to your work so that you can finalize the marketing plan yourself within little time. You can view the basic structure of how your marketing plan's structure will be here but all appropriate adjustments will be provided by myself as well as supplying you with all the biographical and non-biographical resources from where I took all the necessary information for the plan’s production. In that way you will have not only most of the work done for you, but also guide you through all the sources used. In this way, you can also learn from the same resources I used before presenting the work to your teacher so that you are able to answer all the questions that your teacher or colleagues might enquire.

WHAT YOU GET:

So, basically, when hiring my services I will provide you with the structure of the marketing plan including the research results of the specific market of study, bullet points of what you should be focused on for each part of the plan and a full bibliography of all the resources found during the research which will be sufficient for you to finish off the plan yourself in little time.

HOW I WILL DO IT:

Once we have agreed in the plan's production I will need to be briefed by you on the project you were asked to do. You will need to send me all the relevant material that was provided by your teacher along with any guidelines on the specific marketing plan structure that you teacher asked you to follow, if any. I will need you to provide me with the deadlines and any other relevant information that will help me in the production of the marketing plan. Once I take on the project I will be available for contact via e-mail (marketing.plan.writer@gmail.com) and via skype or MSN. I will provide you with these contact details after your initial contact. E-mail me on marketing.plan.writer@gmail.com to find out more about how I can help.

The Marketing Plan Structure

The marketing plan structure will depend on your type of business. Here I will highlight a standard outline for a marketing plan, however, depending on your market situation, whether you are selling products or services, whether you are targeting businesses or consumers, or if you are a not-for-profit organisation, sections may be added or removed accordingly to what is most suitable. Below follows the general structure:

1.0 Executive Summary
This section is a high-level summary of the marketing plan including the most important facts regarding the target, the strategy and the goals.

2.0 Situation Analysis
Brief the situation analysis by providing an introduction about your organisation, define where it stands in the market and what are its main advantages in relation to competitors or market opportunities.

2.1 Market Summary
General summary of the specific market characteristics in which the organisation is involved and highlighting the most important factors that may have a strong effect (either positive or negative) in the organisation.

2.1.1 PEST Analysis
Identify here the Political, Economical, Social and Technological macro-environmental factors that can affect your business.

2.1.2 Target Market
Identify who are your customers/audience you want to reach and characterise them.

2.1.3 Market Analysis
Identify the market growth during the last few years, prevision for the future along with any other market insights.

2.1.4 Market Needs
Explain the market needs you wish to fill and what specific values your organisation will provide to fill these needs.

2.1.5 Market Trends
What factors seem to be affecting changes to your market and how these might affect your business or your target’s response to your products/services?

2.2 SWOT Analysis

• Strengths: List all the advantages or strong points within your organisation or regarding the product/service itself.
• Weaknesses: List all the disadvantages or weak points within your organisation or regarding the product/service itself.
• Opportunities: List all the market advantages and strong points regarding your organisation’s macro environment beyond your control that may benefit your business, product or service.
• Threats: List all the market disadvantages or weak points regarding your organisation’s macro environment beyond your control that may affect negatively your business, product or service.

2.3 Competition
Define a list of your direct and indirect competitors describing each main strengths and weaknesses along with their market share, the marketing strategy they use and any other relevant information about them.

2.4 Critical Success Factors/ Keys to Success
List the three or four key priorities for your business. These must be the priorities you need to focus on as the main key advantages that will differentiate your business/product or service from the competitors.

2.5 Critical issues
Taking in consideration the SWOT analysis, list the issues that you find crucial to take in consideration in order to minimize the weaknesses and surpass the threats while prioritising your business strengths. By doing this, categorise your organisation into its current life cycle.

3.0 Marketing Strategy
Write a brief summary of the strategies to take in order to achieve specific goals.

3.1 Mission
Write a good mission statement to reach all stakeholders that describes the company’s business and its value proposition.

3.2 Objectives
List here your marketing objectives, not only with the aim to generate sales but also any other relevant objectives such as relating to the brand awareness, employee motivation, among others. They should, however, all be interlinked with each other and try to focus on no more than 5 objectives so that each and every one of them are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible).

3.3 Target
List here specifically the type of customers your company will be focused in reaching. Specify the targets demographics, habits, income or any other relevant characteristics. Before identifying these groups you must ensure that you know very well this audience and that you will be able to communicate to them effectively.

3.4 Positioning
This should be a strong statement that will clearly identify your company’s approach to the market focusing on the most important market need the company will cover and how it plans to satisfy that need differentiating itself from the competitors.

3.5 The Marketing Mix
Identify here what you plan to achieve in terms of branding and value proposition to compete effectively in the marketplace through the use of the various marketing mix tools.

3.5.1 Product
Describe here your long term product/service strategy taking in consideration all its characteristics, such as branding, labelling, packaging as well as any features and attributes.

3.5.2 Promotion
Describe how the product will be promoted in terms of advertising, sales promotion, public relations and personal selling, summarising the methods used and the spending involved for each method.

3.5.3 Distribution
Here you will specify where and when your customers will be able to find your products/services, in which quantities and delivery times.

3.5.4 Pricing
Define the price of your products/services which should be based on the analysis of the cost of production/delivery, demand, image and competitors prices. Here can also be identified if any discounts can be applied to the price at any given situation.

4.0 Marketing Budget and forecasts
Determine the marketing budget, break-even analysis and financial sales forecasts required to implement the plan as defined in the previous topics for at least the period of 1 year. The use of visual graphics and tables is advised throughout this section.

4.1 Marketing Budget
Define the spending involved in the implementation of the marketing plan breaking down each tactical marketing decision and its total cost over the period of at least one year.

4.2 Break-even Analysis
The Breakeven analysis will indicate the level of sales required before the company realises a positive marketing contribution.

4.3 Sales Forecasts
Define the sales forecasts in time taking in consideration the marketing plan implementation. Present your forecasts in a table followed by an illustrative graphic and provide consistent reasons for the forecast, highlighting what the expected progress in sales will be throughout the year.

5.0 Controls and Evaluation
In this section define how you will make sure that the marketing plan is implemented throughout time. Also identify the methods used to measure the effectiveness of each marketing tactic and how the results will be evaluated.

5.1 Contingency planning
Taking in consideration unexpected issues that may come up such as economic or market factors, or following the failure of certain tactics, define how the company will respond to these industry changes or provide alternative marketing actions to take.

6.0 Timeline
Define in a chart all the actions to take place throughout time in order to implement the marketing plan, allocating the frequency of each activity and the person responsible for each one, as well as highlighting any deadlines or important dates to consider.