Essay MPM705: CRM Relationship – Related Creative, Media, Integrated Marketing – Marketing Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

This assignment is designed to encourage students to take a critical and strategic view of competitive advantage in the global retail industry. The current disruption in the industry has led to traditional brick and mortar retailers failing. These retailers typically have not innovated, believing that what worked in the 1990’s will continue to work in 2020. Retailers who have embraced new ideas and retail innovations have filled the gap of these failed businesses. In Australia, think of Kogan.com for electronic and homeware retail. In China, think of Hema for supermarkets. In the US, think of Amazon for everything. 

People still want to shop and have a great retail experience. How will you offer this to them?

The Assignment must be completed in a group, with a maximum of 4 members.

Group work enhances your teamwork skills, reduces the workload and provides the opportunity to test your knowledge with your co-worker/classmate. Further, careers in retailing require working with different groups of stakeholders.

To be successful at this assignment, you have to put on your entrepreneurial hat and come up with a low-risk innovative retail solution. 

Context: Given the increasing failure rates for traditional retailers in Australia, it is time to rethink how consumers want to engage with retailers. Recent events like the coronavirus and increased public-safety issues have also changed consumer behaviour in many countries. You are tasked to reimagine retail to become of retail-as-a-service, as opposed to retail as purely an experience that requires a customer to be physically present in a facility. 

In this assignment, you will focus on customer recruitment online. This key component of the retail function enables sales or service to happen. For example, travel agents recruit customers and sell tickets for airlines and holiday packages. Education agents recruit students for Australian universities. 

You are to analyse the industry and outline a plan for a retail startup. This startup will act as an agent to recruit students for Deakin and other Australian universities. Your startup acts a contractor for Deakin, and is not part of any university. 

The startup will identify one area (choose one only) to disrupt the student recruitment industry. This should focus on using retail marketing ICT to create an offering that helps students decide on a university. A key is to lower students’ perceived risk when using your startup. You may position your startup towards these markets (choose one only):

• Full time studies
• Education as a service (gaining accreditation for modules taken)
• Overseas recruitment

You should clearly outline the benefits that can be gained by using your startup’s services – e.g., convenience, trust, access to some resource not available to others, sustainability etc. Research will be web-based and you should identify competitors and perform a full evaluation of their competitive offering and positioning.

This assignment should focus on the retail offering, not the ICT. You only have to identify what the value proposition your startup will offer to potential students.

STRATEGY

Your team members will fill these positions: technology lead, marketing lead, product lead, channel lead. Each member must contribute to the satisfaction of the group to receive the group grade. There is a group contract and group evaluation in this document that you should discuss, change, sign and submit on Cloud Deakin. Please post the contract as a message in your group discussion space by week 3 of trimester. The contents of this agreement will be used to mediate and decide on courses of action when group conflict escalates.

For maximum productivity, I suggest approaching the assignment as:

• Research – who is target? Where to find them? How to access them/communicate with them? What is important to them? How large is the target segment?
• Describe target segment and relationships you will build with them? What is valuable and will make them come back to your startup?
• Web strategy or functionalities that will enable the relationships to be built.
• Related creative, media, integrated marketing, 
• domain development, naming, 
• Retail viability calculations.

This assignment seeks to simulate the thinking behind reimagining retailing as a service offering. Use the retail theories presented in this course to help you think. To do well, these theories and frameworks should be demonstrated in your assignment. You may conduct brief surveys or use class-discussion time to perform research – talk to your friends, family and classmates who have recently tried to enrol in university or other formalised learning courses. Also, it helps to do some shopping online for the product – agents that help students sign-up for degree study. You may also use introspection as some of you have recently used agents’ services to enrol at Deakin University.

To keep this real, you will have a budget of AUD 140,000 +25% (4 partners each coming up with some cash upfront). This will be total startup costs, you have no more to invest. This money is to last you for 12 months and you will have to provide projected a return on this investment that is based on your proposed activities. Give us your calculations as an appendix and put a list of strategic items (e.g., an account/spreadsheet/financial table) that a business owner can easily understand. i.e., I will do A media to get to result B increase in sales – $3000. A will cost Y dollars – $1000. After we spend Y dollars, we should increase sales by X amount – 160 units. This will give us Z profit/market share/growth – $4000 in total sales minus $1000 additional costs of A, gives $3000 result for B. So By doing A and spending Y, you will get result B. Note that every strategic “vector/initiative” has to be costed and have a return – this will help you to check whether your strategy is achievable. 

There is no stock. You are selling degree applications. Each student you manage to recruit earns you a commission that is 10% of the student’s first year’s school fees. 

You will have to bear all costs to recruit and convert the student, just like a travel agent retailer.

The following sections describe the key elements that need to be considered and included in your retail strategy report.

Background

Use the material from the brief to write an industry background section for your assignment. You will have to then decide on a retail position and strategy. This has to be researched and substantiated by using retail frameworks, peer-reviewed literature and studies. 

Have a quick look at the external elements that are affecting the industry. Is it growing, shrinking, stagnant? What do experts say about the sector’s prospects in industry reports? What are industry drivers? Focus on what makes a potential student use a student recruitment agency. Use the library resources like reports from the Ministry of Education Australia. I have included some statistical information in the assignment folder. 

Decide on an achievable target market in terms of your proposition and ICT. What are you going to offer them and how will you reach them? Look at the consulting reports relating to the 4th Industrial Revolution. What is your value proposition – this should be different from the university’s value-proposition. 

Evaluate Competitor or Collaborator Web Sites  

Go to four related web sites and shop for the product for which you are developing the strategy.  For example, if you were shopping for degrees, you may use independent consolidator websites or review websites that give you information about degrees. Be brief and to the point in your description. You may wish to constrain this search to only one student ‘sector’ – e.g., applying from offshore, or onshore application only, undergraduate or graduate students. Perhaps constrain to a specific geographic area (e.g., South Asia, East Asia, Americas or Europe).

1. Identify the retailers you chose and why.
2. How do you compare your experience shopping on the Internet for this type of product? Is there an option for face-to-face shopping – e.g., education fairs, campus visits?
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the shopping experience? Focus on ICT.