Three year marketing plan for business growth

Computer-generated, modified, step-count responses can be capable of providing an intensive, yet affordable, way to increase the physical activity of people at high risk for cardiovascular disease. This essay entails a 3-year marketing plan for a pedometer, or an instrument for estimating the distance traveled on foot by recording the number of steps taken, with motivational messages and sounds to help people increase overall fitness levels this product is designed to help busy women incorporate exercise into everyday life, instead of making time to "hit the gym." Intensive interventions targeting diet and physical activity are effective for weight reduction, but are typically time consuming and costly. Thus, this alternate to the traditional fitness center has more benefits for the woman with a limited or fixed schedule. This expedites the process of fitness, along with inviting more people to engage for the benefits of better health.

Target Market Definition:

Our target market revolves around a group of female customers, mainly between the ages of 25 and 60 years of age, that the business has decided to aim its marketing efforts and ultimately its merchandise. The objective is to test the feasibility of adding this computer generated modified step-count response to an available nutritional counseling weight loss intervention. The first element to a marketing strategy is the establishment of a well-defined target market. A target market or target audience is a group of customers that this fitness option has decided to aim its marketing efforts and ultimately its merchandise. The target market and the marketing mix variables of product, place (distribution), promotion and price are the two elements of a marketing mix strategy that determine the success of a product in the marketplace.

Product / Distribution Objective:

This product strategy includes a variation of goals, objectives, and tactics concerning estimates of the clear and technological precision of the distance traveled on foot by recording the number of steps taken, with motivational messages and sounds to help people increase overall fitness levels this product is designed to help busy women incorporate exercise into everyday life, instead of making time to "hit the gym."

What differentiates this product and distributive objective from other strategic exercise regimes, however, involves the purpose and supporting content that explains and perhaps even justifies how the strategy will meet set goals. The product strategy will ultimately be the document that guides the Product Manager's decisions through Product Management activities over a specified time allotment.

The product strategy's overall purpose is to assist the company in achieving corporate goals. Accordingly, this should be aligned to the corporate strategy. The corporate strategy should direct the goals for the product strategy. As the document is strategic, it should also include how the product strategy will be competitive. An assessment of the market will be conducted before the composition of our tactical plan, which may consist of one or more of these elements:

Competitor analysis

Product comparisons

Market and industry trends

Customer insight

Structure of current product / brand offerings

The data gathered from this research will assist in SWOT analysis, identifying areas to focus product strategy. This will assist in gaining an advantage over your competitors' products. Since this strategy concerns a completely new product, the safer and overall better approach would be to conduct all research and analysis using Porter's Five Forces.

Sometimes, I do my research before I define my product objectives or at this point I go back to my objectives and refine or add to them. I also do a quick check to make sure the focus of my strategy is still in line with these goals.

Project Objective:

SWOT analysis may limit the strategies considered in the evaluation. J. Scott Armstrong notes that "people who use SWOT might conclude that they have done an adequate job of planning and ignore such sensible things as defining the firm's objectives or calculating ROI for alternate strategies." Findings from Menon et al. (1999) and Hill and Westbrook (1997) have shown that SWOT may harm performance. As an alternative to SWOT, Armstrong describes a 5-step approach alternative that leads to better corporate performance.

These criticisms are addressed to an old version of SWOT analysis that precedes the SWOT analysis described above under the heading "Strategic and Creative Use of SWOT Analysis." This old version did not require that SWOTs be derived from an agreed upon objective. Examples of SWOT analyses that do not state an objective are provided below under "Human Resources" and "Marketing" (Armstrong).

Project Management:

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources that would cause the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is sometimes conflated with program management. Regardless, a program is technically a higher level construct. Any group of related and somehow interdependent projects is key to product management.

A project is a temporary attempt. With a defined start and finish, typically reserved to a specified date, these can be by funding or deliverables, undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, usually to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to business as usual or operations, which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or repairs. Essentially, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived project constraints. Typical constraints are scope, time, and budget. The next and more ambitious challenge requires the optimization of the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives. (Nokes)

Price Objective:

Pricing objectives grant direction to the entire pricing operation. The first step in pricing concerns acknowledgement of these objectives. Here are guidelines to follow when choosing which pricing objectives to consider:

The overall financial, marketing, and strategic objectives of the company;

The objectives of your product or brand;

Consumer price elasticity and price points; and the resources available.

Many of the more common pricing objectives focus on maximizing long-run profit or maximizing short-run profit; increasing sales or increasing sale volume / quantity; increasing monetary sales or expanding market shares; obtain a target rate of return on investment (ROI); obtain a target rate of return on sales; stabilize market or stabilize market price. An objective to stabilize price means that the marketing manager attempts to keep prices stable in the marketplace and to compete on non-price considerations. Stabilization of margin is basically a cost-plus approach in which the manager attempts to maintain the same margin regardless of changes in cost.

Place Objective:

Depreciation involves the expense generated by an asset; the wear and tear of an asset or decrease of the set value due to usage; the cost of the asset less any salvage value over its estimated useful life; or even an expense that has been matched against the revenue generated through the use of the same asset. Typically, since it is regarded as the cost of an asset absorbed over its useful life, patterns of depreciation are spread over the economically useful life of an asset.