MBA MARKETING MODULE ASSIGNMENT

Length: 3,000 words excluding references, figures, and tables; appendices

should be used where appropriate
The assignment is composed of TWO parts.
PART ONE
ACME has developed a range of specialist coffees and wishes to market these within the UK market.
ACMEs founder, Joe Bloggs, has no experience in trading in the UK or elsewhere and has limited
resources.

Company and Product Background:

ACME Coffee UK is based in Hull. ACME claim to offer exclusive Colombian Coffee at affordable
prices under the brand name ACME Coffee. The founder, Joe Blogs, is a trained qualified coffee taster
and regularly visits coffee plantations in Colombia to pick the coffee. As the master coffee taster, he
personally inspects every batch produced under ACME brand name. While Mr. Blogs is an expert in
coffee, he has very little business experience. All ACME coffee are produced in a traditional manner
and traceable to the plantation. ACME does not blend coffee as they believe that their customers
should get the best.

Tasks
Create an abridged Marketing plan that examines the initial marketing campaign and advise how the
company should introduce ACME coffee in to the UK market place.
Specifics:
You have the freedom to determine the parameters of the campaign. In producing your marketing
plan, please pay particular attention to the following four critical areas.

Who is ACMEs target market? What customer need are ACME coffee addressing? What
value is given to customers?

What would be ACME coffees key differentiation/positioning? Why would you think this
differentiation/positioning would be successful?

How should ACME go about communicating with their customers? Please discuss the
nature of its message, its tone and desired response.

How would ACME go about pricing its products?

How would ACME ensure that the customers get the product?

Your recommendations should be justified through careful consideration. In other words, you should
demonstrate that you have applied marketing tools in your analysis, and the output of such analysis
should be shown in the appendix.

Assumptions:
In putting together the report, you WILL have to make assumptions. Any assumptions made should
be sensible, logical, and clearly based upon available information. In preparing the report, you MUST
state where such assumptions have been made.

(Part one-in no more than 2250 words, worth 75% of the assignment marks)
PART TWO
Drawing upon a number of examples of your choosing, demonstrate how the web can be used to
vary an element of the marketing mix. Conclude by assessing whether, based upon your analysis,
the web constitutes a disruptive innovation for marketing. Please remember that you should only
select a single element of the Marketing mix, say for example price or place but not both.
Your essay must show how theoretical foundations can be applied in practical applications. To succeed
it is critical that you read both text books and journal articles to see how others have used theories of
Marketing you are writing about and use their ideas to underpin your own arguments
If you dont include such arguments based on literature sources, properly referenced in your work, you
will fail this element.
It must be written in essay format and in accordance with the rules relating to using Harvard
referencing. This should be included as a subsection of the main report.

(Part two in no more than 750 words, worth 25% of the assignment marks)

Notes
a) You need to use key analysis tools to examine the external operating environment, and identify the
organizations marketing response. You must base your analysis on the use of a range of tools e.g.
PEST, Porters 5 forces, BCG, PLC and others that are relevant.
b) All analysis you undertake using these models go in the reports appendix (i.e. the application
of each model to examine say the organizations product portfolio).
c) By undertaking a deep analysis of the business you should be able identify and discuss the key
themes and state what their implications are i.e. how they will impact on the marketing activities of
the organization. Only the outcome (implications) of the analysis should be discussed in the main
body.
d) You may use SWOT to summarize key themes. This must then result in the identification of
matching strategies that feed through into you recommendations
e) Part a to be written as a standard marketing plan in report format, part b to be written as an essay
f) The excessive usage of company produced material within the main body (more than 10% of total
word count) will be considered as poor academic practice and may result in the award of a fail mark.

Avoiding failure
On what grounds do students fail this module, and indeed the reasons underpinning persistent
failures are consistent in many cases. Use this as a check list before you submit

1.

First and foremost plagiarism. Have I copied and pasted anything from a web-site,
electronic document. This in itself is the poorest level of performanceand invites a zero
mark, investigation and possible termination of study. Take it seriously!!! Dont guess
the conventions, read your study skills handbook, or ask. All work must be your own
except when quoting. Quotations are verbatim accounts of other peoples work that demand
explicit acknowledgment by you of the source of the quote. So..?

2. Have I indicated all such quotations as such with the author and the page number next to it
as such (Smith, 2009: p.101)?
3. Have I used multiple quality literature sources, academic books are good, journals are better?
Are just 1 or 2 cited sources in my bibliography
4. Have I inscoffeed just googled it, this is lazy practice and invites failure. Indicators are
bibliographies that include, wikipidea, QuickMBA.com and dozens of other free and highly
dubious sources that a thousand other students before you have used?
5.

Have I applied theory or have I just described the context (business, market, industry) from
my own subjective experience, or juts told a story based of facts about a company that I have
collected and reported. Aanalysis should produce unusual and different insights based on the
same facts. Think explicitly what tools have I used in each section. If you cant answer.. then
it is probably descriptive work and invites failure?

COURSEWORK: ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

The work must be word-processed and submitted by the hand-in date set. Also, the document must be
written in Times New Roman, font 12, and all margins must be of 2.5 cm. The text should be justified
and double spaced.
Harvard Referencing system should be adopted - see study skills guide
Marking criteria
Success in the marketing module, and indeed in your future career, depends to a large extent on
judgment and communication. Two key issues are involved. First, critical judgment refers to whether,
how, and under what circumstances a particular theory, concept, or a set of marketing techniques can
be used or cited. In other words, marketing and its associated armory of concepts and techniques can
only be deployed in situation-specific contexts to find consumer-oriented solutions to business
problems. The context or circumstance is, in all cases, the driving force to which businesses should
respond in other words a marketing orientation. Thus, even for organizations competing in the same
marketplace or marketspace, there are no ready-made solutions or pat answers to marketing
questions.
Second, critical reasoning refers to how to marshal or develop specific arguments in response to
questions or scenarios. In other words, it concerns using your judgment to select how best to advance
and support a viewpoint. It is up to you to develop critical judgment and appropriate arguments in
your responses to assignments. Whether and under what circumstances a particular theory, concepts,
or set of marketing techniques can be used or cited to improve insight into a situation is a matter of
critical judgment. You will be assessed on the quality of these arguments and judgments.
When marking your assignment, your tutor is looking for evidence that you have achieved the
intended learning outcomes. This will be assessed by markers as part of a University Quality Control
Process, which uses second markers and external examiners to monitor standards and consistency in
assessment. Credit for your work will be partly based on:
Clarity of expression, overall planning, and coherence of your work.
Knowledge and understanding of the issues related to management work and skills development.
Ability to draw appropriate and logical conclusions.
Evidence of learning through reflection.
Further, your mark will be based on the evidence, provided by you in your assignment, that you have
met the coursework assessment criteria.