Chapter 2: Marketing Environment and Planning
2.3 Discussion Questions and Activities
Review and Reflect
- Explain how a marketing objective differs from a marketing strategy. How are they related?
- Explain how an organization like McDonald’s can use licensing to create value for the brand.
- How has PepsiCo employed a product development strategy?
- Discuss how conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis helps a firm (or an individual) develop its strategic plan.
- Describe the value propositions social media sites like YouTube and Twitter offer users.
Activities
- Outline a strategic plan for yourself to begin planning for a job after graduation. Include your value proposition, targeted organizations, objectives, strategies, and the internal and external factors that may affect your plans.
- Assume you have an interview for an entry-level sales position. Write a value proposition emphasizing why you are the best candidate for the position relative to other recent college graduates.
- A mission statement outlines an organization’s purpose and answers the question of how a company defines its business. Write a mission statement for a campus organization.
- Fjallraven Kanken (Kånken Me Mini) allows customers to customize Fjallraven backpacks in different colours. Identify and explain the product market or market development strategies Fjallraven pursued when it introduced personalized backpacks.
- Explain how changing demographics and the social and cultural environment have impacted the health care industry. Identify new venues for health care that didn’t exist a decade ago.
- Select an organization for which you would like to work. Look up its mission statement. What do you think the organization’s objectives and strategies are? What macro and micro environmental and internal factors might affect its success?
- Break up into teams. Come up with as many real-world examples as you can of companies that pursued market penetration, market development, product development, or diversification strategies. Explain what the company did and how successful you think each strategy will be.
