Using Amazon as a case study, you are to take on the role of a strategic marketing consultant who has been asked to produce a strategic marketing plan to help the organisation to be successful going forward in their activities.

This assignment will require you to apply relevant strategic marketing tools, theories and concepts to identify and evaluate your organisations’ current situation and provide a realistic strategic plan for the future. You may look at the whole organisation or look at a specific part of the organisation (e.g. a specific department, unit, division, faculty, etc). In order to produce a well-informed strategic marketing report students are expected to complete the following tasks:

Market orientation analysis – evaluate and define your organisations’ current strategic approach in relation to market orientation. You will need to explore your organisation’s mission, values and activities to gain a clearer idea of what the overall strategic approach is within the organisation.

Strategic analysis – conduct a situational analysis for your organisation to identity key issues and opportunities facing your organisation from the internal and external environment. To do this you will need to apply appropriate strategic analysis tools (e.g. PESTLE, Porter’s five force, customer analysis, internal resource analysis etc), evaluate the key findings from your application of these strategic tools and draw together the main findings using a SWOT analysis.

Strategic objectives, choice and tactics – using the information and knowledge gained from the situational analysis, formulate SMART strategic objectives and evaluate and select the most appropriate strategic choice/s and tactics to achieve the objectives using relevant theories and models.

Strategic implementation – Based on your recommendations, outline an action plan so that the organisation has a clear plan going forward to implement and achieve the strategic marketing objectives and recommendations. The timescale, responsibilities and methods of control for the strategic marketing plan is to be determined by you, depending on the issues/opportunities understood from your research and analysis of the situation.

Guidelines

Your submission should be 3500 words in length (+/- 10%).

Title page, contents page, executive summary, final reference list, appendices, images, charts and diagrams do not count towards the word count.

In-text references, headings and subheadings do count towards the word count.

You must use a report format for the assignment. A report format generally consists of the following key headings which are normally numbered:

– Title page

– Contents page

– Executive summary (a brief and concise summary of the whole report)

– Introduction

– Main sections (here you will need to create key headings and subheadings relevant to your discussion points)

– References

– Appendices (if needed, appendices should only be used if there is essential or supporting material that is too long or detailed to include in the main report – please note that appendices are not marked and therefore do not use this for information that should be discussed in the main report)

You will need to have subheadings within each of the sections to further break down your content to make the information clear and easy to access.

Use a combination of academic sources, organisational reports, market reports and credible websites to inform your judgement and assessment.

Your report should also be presented to the level of professionalism (concise, coherent, well written and articulate) which would be expected of you from a real organisation.

State the word count either on the front page or at the end of the document.

Use the Harvard referencing system.