9 Phase 5 final individual project

Editor's Notes

• #3: Repurposed work from past CTU assignment Our mission is simple: Make top end phones that are wanted and meet the needs of our newest target market male/female ages 21-35, educated, multilingual, our current loyal consumers, to bring back the consumers we have lost in the last 4 years, and to start preparations to go global. Too many times we have seen other cell phone companies recommend solutions that are innovative, strategic, and multi-faceted meeting the needs of the cell phone market in the United States and Globally, Mobile Manufacturing Inc. has fallen behind in these areas. This is unacceptable. We want to bring Mobile Manufacturing Inc. back to the levels we were at 11 years ago. We strive to make our phones functional, technologically up to date, and have the features our consumers want. I would like to say to all of you, that this is the beginning of a new era for Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. We are about to embark on the cutting-edge and best phone Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. has developed and marketed since the first couple models. I am so excited and confident to start this AIM project, this project is going to INCREASE our customer base, INCREASE our profits, eventually INCREASE our brand globally and take Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. to the highest levels of our industry.
• #4: The first and most important goal is to increase the overall Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. sales through the design, development, marketing, and sales of the new cell phone. The outline I will be using to obtain these goals will be: Develop an overall objective or a long term result Identify and quantify the result Develop a strategic plan around obtaining the result Break the strategic plan into strategies and tactics that are short-term attainable goals that lead to the overall objective being met Repeat steps 1-5 until all desired actions are clearly determined (Business Management, 2011). When developing goals, it is helpful to follow SMART planning. Be sure to develop goals and goals that follow a few golden rules. (SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible.) (Business Management, 2011). My next goal to make this project AIM successful is to conduct research on the demographic I believe we will gain the most revenue from Market target for sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35. There will need to be more than one perspective gained from this research, functionality needs of our target consumers, and income and how much our target income spends on cell phone, so we will need to conduct a mixed research. My next goal is to increase in sales 20% within first year of production. As I said earlier SMART planning is the way I believe we will have the best chance to attain this goal, which I add, is an attainable goal. To add five sales people to Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. organization in the next 90 days who will result in 75 calls per day, of which (based on prior sales history) 10% will close and result in an additional $1,000,000 in revenue and a 20% increase in sales, year over year. We will also employee a new TV advertising campaign (Business Management, 2011). Our initial target market is going to be in the United States, BUT, eventually we will need to market this product globally. We must think a head and study the global market. "Look at the marketplace we want to go into," says Adamson. "Who’s there? Who’s winning? Who’s losing?” The more we are familiar with the country’s local demographics, the easier it will be to determine our market and promote our brand. We must also find out what the competition is like (Inc. Magazine, 2010).
• #5: When designing a strategy for your research project chose a research design that will be driven by the research project that you think is interesting in the case of Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. it would be to research and analyze our target market sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35 demographics, features, colors, styles of our new phone For example, some research, such as experiments with the use of variables, in the physical sciences, further lend themselves to quantitative research designs. By distinction, more exploratory research in the social sciences is time and again found to use qualitative research designs (Ouyang, nd). Qualitative approach: It includes historical research and qualitative research; It collects narrative data to gain insights into phenomena of interest; data analysis includes the coding of the data and production of a verbal synthesis (Ouyang, nd). There are five qualitative strategies that researchers use most often: Case Study: Ethnography: Phenomenology: Grounded Theory: Focus Groups: Historical Research: It is categorized with descriptive research, correlational research, causal-comparative research and experimental research; it collects numerical data in order to explain, predict and or control phenomena of interest; data analysis is mainly statistical (Ouyang, nd).   Strategies used in quantitative research: Experiment: Surveys: Of the types of quantitative research designs which can be implemented, the first is descriptive design--the examination of variables in natural environments, unfettered by researchers' treatments. Experimental design and quasi-experimental studies focus on causal relationships, as they study differences in dependent variables affected by treatments (Creswell, 2009). For instance, in the healthcare industry, a quantitative study might analyze the relationship between food intake and quantifiable weight gain. On the other hand, you could take our industry and analyze the income of individual or family and quantifiable money spent on cell phones. Furthermore, opinion surveys are also quantitative, as respondents answer scalable or fixed questions, allowing for tally. Statistics can also be compiled and compared to assess causal relationships (Martin, nd). Both qualitative and quantitative methods of user research play important roles in product development. Data from quantitative research such as market size, demographics, and user preferences provides important information for business decisions. Qualitative research provides valuable data for use in the design of a product including data about user needs, behavior patterns, and use cases. Each of these approaches has strengths and weaknesses, and each can benefit from our combining them with one another. (Creswell, 2009)
• #6: Idea generation often known as brainstorming is used to come up with a mixture of new methodologies or solutions to an question at hand (Agency for Healthcare Research and quality, 2012). We can do this alone or in groups, idea generation is more productive when you follow a few parameters and use a variety of simple techniques that encourage differing thinking, suggesting many different options and the deliberate intellectual processes of attention, escape challenging an existing concept, and movement spawning ideas freely (Agency for Healthcare Research and quality, 2012). This will be a technique that we will use with the marketing and sales teams to develop the product name, slogans, taglines, colors, lettering etc. The marketing and sales team know our customers the best, get feed back from them and are familiar with their wants and needs, they will also develop the marketing strategy for the new phone. Idea screening Once we have a list of accepted ideas to go to the short list we will begin the process of idea screening. With our list of prospective new product ideas, we will now need to decide which ideas to take up and which to abandon (Agency for Healthcare Research and quality, 2012). The team will consider our competition, our existing products, their shortcomings, and the needs of our market. We will use data Drawn from a customer needs list we have already developed, and the areas for product improvement we have identified, to be used as lessons learned in the development of this new phone (Agency for Healthcare Research and quality, 2012). Concept development and testing When we, the sales and marketing team come across what we believe to be a reasonable idea; however, the idea needs to be taken to our target audience (Learn Marketing, nd). We need to gain data on, what do they think about the idea? Will it be practical and feasible? Will it offer the benefit that the Mobile Manufacturing In. hopes it will? Or have we overlooked certain issues? Note the idea taken to the target audience is not a working prototype at this stage; it is just a concept (Learn Marketing, nd). Our development team must take into account the fact that as we add more detail, particularly creative execution, to the concept, we risk testing reaction to the advertising instead of reaction to the concept (LORD, 2000). Marketing strategy development Successful marketing starts with a painstaking, well-informed marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy will helps us define our vision, mission and business goals which is a demographic of sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35., and outlines the steps we will need to take to achieve these goals (Business and industry portal, 2013). We will develop and write our marketing strategy using strategic segments, some of which have already been identified. Identify our business goals State our marketing goals Research our market Profile our potential customers Profile our competitors Develop strategies to support our marketing goals Use the '5 Ps of marketing Test our ideas (Business and industry portal, 2013)
• #7: Business analysis The market we will need to look at is our potential market multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35, not the actual market served, the one that's limited to our existing customers. Our target market is much wider than just the people we already reach. It's the people you might someday reach, or people you could reach, that we need to be concerned about, our future (Berry, 2005). So as you can see we need to know as much about our market as possible, above and beyond just the target market we have identified in our strategy, this is what the business analysis will get us, a look at the market as a whole. Product development Product development starts when all of the last 5 processes have been studied, understood and analyzed. The New Product Development process is often referred to as The Stage-Gate innovation process, developed by Dr. Robert G. Cooper as a result of comprehensive research on reasons why products succeed and why they fail (Brands, 2013). We have already discussed parts of the product development life cycle. Idea Generating Screening the Idea Testing the Concept Marketing strategy development Business Analytics All these processes have lead up to the product development stage, giving the phone its features such as MS office, video, translator, what other apps to have etc.. in a way that will allow Mobile Manufacturing Inc. to get the most ROI of this new phone (Brands, 2013). Test marketing When launching a new, mass-market product or marketing campaign, we will need to first conduct a small-scale launch or other customer research in a test market, universities, targeted online customers, and customer drawn in from TV ads. The reason of this type of test marketing is to gauge how our phone/ product will be received on a wider scale (CBS Money Watch, 2007). Test marketing helps ensure our phone/product and marketing strategy are sound, and it can also provide our teams with valuable information on customer response, marketing channels, and distribution issues. With the results from our test market in hand, we can move forward with our full phone/product launch with confidence, or if necessary, refine your marketing strategy (CBS Money Watch, 2007). Commercialization Commercialization is the process by which our new product and service will be introduced into the general market. Commercialization is broken into phases, an accumulation of all the phases we have just discussed, from the initial introduction of the product through its mass production and adoption. It takes into account the production, distribution, marketing, sales and customer support required to achieve commercial success. As a strategy, commercialization requires us to business develop a marketing plan, determine how the product will be supplied to the market and anticipate barriers to success (Investopedia, nd).
• #8: Pricing we use the Penetration Pricing strategy, as I have said, We can use this strategy to reach more of our target market with a higher volume of our phones, as a reminder our target market are multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35, this target market segment and they are in school, just out of school and just getting their careers started and may not be willing to invest a lot of money into a new phone from a company that doesn’t have the best of reputation (Skidmore, nd). This I believe will enable us to attain all of our goals in the marketing plan, better position Mobile Manufacturing Inc. as a reputable organization that has good products that people will want to have well into the future increasing our loyal customer base along with making a product that will be better received in the global market (Dedrick, Kraemer, & Linden, 2010). Distributuion Marketing and distribution is all about “getting the right product, in the right quantity, to the right place, at the right time” (Small Bussiness Development Corporation, nd). The distribution of our new phone will mainly be our exciting retail stores, but we will be using a mixed approach. The main distribution channel will be our manufacturing to our retail stores; we will also add kiosks in the major Universities getting volume close to our college demographic (Small Bussiness Development Corporation, nd). With the digital (internet) and TV and other (Traditional) promotions we will have, we will also have a channel that will consist of direct distribution, our manufacturing direct to our consumer. This will satisfy any online sales enabling our target consumer to order and have our phone shipped directly to their residence achieving a lower cost to Mobile Manufacturing Inc. not having to pay for shipping to our retail stores (Small Bussiness Development Corporation, nd) Promotional strategies We will start our own Facebook page, which has the ability to target our goal of areas, interests, and demographics sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35; Twitter according to some news reports is surpassing any other type of social media advertising, so we will have a twitter account. With search engines to be on the first page of a search, say someone types in “cell phones” we will need to do a few thing’s, first have a website with our name on it more than once, two, use “key words” words that go directly with our phone, and also popular “key words” three we need to link out sites to other sites, the more sites we link with the closer to the top of the page the search engine algorithm will put us (Boundless, nd). We are going to send e-mails out to targeted groups focusing on just out target market along with offering deals and discounts for students that purchase our phone through their college website (Kovacevic, nd).
• #9: What we will measure to see if our product plan is working will be of a quantitative nature. We will look at our sales metric and add-on revenue’s, does our promotional activities and advertising bring direct responses ie. direct internet sales, sales created at our kiosks aimed at our goal of female/male educated multi lingual, is our demographic age 21-35 responding from both our internet and TV ads also from our kiosk sales, is our marketing plan making it easier for our sales teams to meet sales goals, is our daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly sales increasing, we will know this by looking at historical data stored, any increases of sales after the start initial roll out of the new phone will show an increase or positive, and are we showing a positive ROI by showing an increase in our customer base, do we have more customers now than we did last week, last month, last quarter or last year (Ayling, nd). Metrics that we will focus on: Revenue increase/decrease Responses to TV/Internet sales, and kiosk sales Marketing plan performance Profit per customer Marketing is not just about reaching the customer, but reaching him/her before our competitor does. Keep a track of your competitor’s product and marketing strategy. When we evaluate our marketing plan, see how our costs, profits, and brands compare with those of our competitors. Proper evaluation of our marketing plan will help us gauge the effectiveness of our marketing strategies and personnel. This exercise should be able to spot any weaknesses in our marketing plan allowing us to fix these and make our next marketing plan more effective (Ayling, nd). .
• #10: Our contingency plan will be in part based on the SWOT analysis we will conduct, SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Having this data will allow us to better determine were the threats to our product plan are and what we should do to prepare for these threats (Renault, nd). A SWAOT analysis also will identify potential opportunities that our plan may have looked over (Renault, nd). With this we can use our strengths to take advantages of these opportunities on the other had we will be able to identify weaknesses in the opportunities to take advantage of them (Renault, nd). My plan consist of, after our quantitative marketing analysis has been conducted, if it identifies that we are not reaching our target market of sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35, either through lack of revenue, negative responses on surveys, TV/internet ads not bringing views to our website. We will take a second look at the specific TV channels we are running our ads on, we will confirm our search engine optimization SEO is at its optimal level, and in our social ads we are focusing on the target goals of sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35. From this data we will increase ads to the area’s we believe are reaching our market, but not at the frequency we would like, we will delete or draw back from ads that we believe are just not reaching our target market, and we will also increase the start-up discounts on our website. If we find that we are reaching our customers and “not” meeting the demand, we will increase production of the phone and move inventory from stores that are slow to the stores and kiosks that are busy. Along with having a contingency plan, we need a contingency budget. No matter how well our SWOT analysis is conducted and what steps we take to mitigate the threats, and take advantages of the opportunities, things happen that are out of everyone’s control and could not possibly be planned on, for these events it is suggested that the be a contingency budget equal to or slightly above the total marketing budget by 10%, if at the end of the year Mobile Manufacturing Inc. does not come up against any unforeseen situations then this budget can be converted to the marketing department, for another or enhanced marketing campaign (Emerald Frog Marketing, nd)
• #11: The demographics you are targeting are wrong. The target markets you have chosen are broke college students, migrant workers, young and unemployed or just starting their careers and will not want to invest into a new phone with lots of technology, I believe the demographic age should be 45-55. The features you have on your phone, Microsoft Office, large screen, translator app, social networking apps, HD video, 35 pixel camera, would only be wanted by a few, your target market, but when this market doesn’t buy the phone, we will have a phone with features that most people won’t want , need or see any benefit in having. The price is all wrong, if we give away discounts, and start the introduction price as low as you would like we will never make a profit. If we do make the sales we will be targeting the low income and be set to distribute at low end stores such as Target, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart. This is not what we want. You want the low end retail low income, I think we should go with upper income, and sell at higher end retailers, Barney’s, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdales, Henri Bendel, Saks’s fifth Ave etc. We will have a larger profit margin and customer loyalty.  
• #12: We have conducted a mixed research study to ensure we are targeting the right demographic. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of user research play important roles in product development. Data from quantitative research such as market size, demographics, and user preferences provides important information for business decisions. Qualitative research provides valuable data for use in the design of a product including data about user needs, behavior patterns, and use cases. Each of these approaches has strengths and weaknesses, and each can benefit from our combining them with one another. (Creswell, 2009) The features we have chosen to add to this phone, are based on the psychographics of our target market, and believe we are on the mark with the features. The psychographics I will be targeting will be looking at two main generations, the generation X, and the millennial generations; these are the 21-35, in age, we will identify the college educated who will be making a larger yearly income, and being we are the US, multi lingual because our country is so diverse and believe this will be a strong selling point. This is going to impact out marketing strategy because both of these generations have primarily grown up with cell phone technology since birth. They are the generations that will purchase the most amounts of cell phones in their life time, and don’t know what to do without that cell phone, something we need to capitalize on (Rose, 2012). These two generations are also going to be around the longest do to age, so for the future of Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. we want to gain the respect, reputation and desire for our product from the consumer that will be using our product for the longest time. The pricing strategy I have chosen for this project is Penetration Pricing strategy, as I have said, We can use this strategy to reach more of our target market with a higher volume of our phones, as a reminder our target market are multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35, this target market segment and they are in school, just out of school and just getting their careers started and may not be willing to invest a lot of money into a new phone from a company that doesn’t have the best of reputation (Skidmore, nd). This I believe will enable us to attain all of our goals in the marketing plan, better position Mobile Manufacturing Inc. as a reputable organization that has good products that people will want to have well into the future increasing our loyal customer base along with making a product that will be better received in the global market (Dedrick, Kraemer, & Linden, 2010).
• #13: I don’t believe the demographics you have chosen will meet the goals of Mobile Manufacturing Inc. 21-35, multi lingual, and educated is not the demographic that is going to be able to spend the money or have the interest on this phone, the age group should be at least 25-45 to increase the buying of this phone. I also believe the start price is too little, I think the price need to increase by at least 30% to ensure costs in manufacturing, distribution, payroll and contracts we have at our retail stores and kiosks and attain the profit margins Mobile Manufacturing Inc. is expecting to have. I also think the promotions need to be added to, I like and understand the “new wave” digital promotions, and I like the traditional promotions you are offering, but I would like to see more ads in newspapers, magazines and coupons that you are not offering. I think these channels are maybe not used as much as in the past, but there are still many consumers that can be reached with these channels, that would meet a redesigned demographics strategy. I think our retail stores, and direct distribution are all we will need to meet the demands, I don’t think we should spend the money to put kiosks in Universities and malls, I don’t think we will have a good return on that investment ROI
• #14: I can understand the concern that the demographic chosen of multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35 may possibly not bring in the revenue that you are looking for, but I am looking at the benefits to this new phone will need to satisfy what our target market needs. Some will want lower costs, some will want high resolution screens, some will want 20 mega pixel cameras, some won’t care about any of the technical features, and will only be concerned about the ability to translate languages, and have Microsoft capabilities (Coursebuildercontent.careeredonline.com, nd). The benefits and the attributes need to be of equal importance, accounting for education and linguistics, and fun and social apps and connection abilities, along with meeting the requirements of the target consumer, both “AIM’d” at our target market (Coursebuildercontent.careeredonline.com, nd). Integrating traditional with the digital channels will be a larger investment and there will be more choices for us to use simply based on our target market, once again multi lingual, educated, 21-35 years old. This age group if educated multi lingual or not have pretty much lived their lives not knowing what life was without digital technology and cell phones, they may know what an older non-smart cell phone was but digital technology is where we will get the biggest bang for our buck (Kovacevic, nd). This is why we will start our own Facebook page, which has the ability to target areas, interests, and demographics; Twitter according to some news reports is surpassing any other type of social media advertising, so we will have a twitter account. With search engines to be on the first page of a search, say someone types in “cell phones” we will need to do a few thing’s, first have a website with our name on it more than once, two, use “key words” words that go directly with our phone, and also popular “key words” three we need to link out sites to other sites, the more sites we link with the closer to the top of the page the search engine algorithm will put us (Boundless, nd). My recommendations for pricing and distribution is straight forward, use the Penetration Pricing strategy, with a low introductory price, to achieve the volume we are looking for to get to our target market multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35 , and using our existing retail stores across the nation, kiosks in our Universities and malls, and direct shipping to the target consumer as our main means of distribution (Small Business Development Corporation, nd). With these strategies in demographics, pricing, promotion and distribution I believe we have covered all the bases, the Product is the right product that our target market will want, the Price is right in line with what our target market will spend, the Promotion reaches our target traditionally and digitally, and the Place (distribution), we are in many retail locations, kiosks in Universities and malls, and direct shipping for ease and conveniences. So we are inline with the goals and strategies to make this project work.
• #15: At times, the parties, us may have equally strong points of view that can make it difficult to determine which is "right," and continuing negotiating efforts may do little to end the stalemate. Finding a compromise in which each side must "give in" to a certain extent may be the only way to achieve a resolution. The key is to make each side feel that the other is giving up something of equal value. I feel that I could compromise on the demographics by increasing the ages from 21-35 to 25-45 to increase the revenues of the phone by reaching more consumers that are further in their careers and make a larger annual income, and I will add more traditional promotions, such as coupons and coupon sites, ads in business magazines, and more ads in large news papers such as the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Price and distribution I feel is a deal breaker and need to stay as planned.
• #16: I would like to say, I AM PROUD TO BE AN INTEGRAL PART OF THIS REBRANDING OF MOBILE MANUFACTURING INC. I AM PROUD TO BE AN INTEGRAL PART OF THIS REBRANDING OF MOBILE MANUFACTURING INC. AIM, (Advanced, Innovative, Mobile) is just the beginning!! I would like to conclude with a run down of this presentation, I talked about: The first and most important goal is to increase the overall Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. sales through the design, development, marketing, and sales of the new cell phone. Aligning our business goals, objectives and personal goals is essential to the success of Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. It is virtually impossible to run a company without a plan, but a plan is useless without objectives and milestones (Business Management, 2011). The outline I will be using to obtain these goals will be: Develop an overall objective or a long term result Identify and quantify the result Develop a strategic plan around obtaining the result Break the strategic plan into strategies and tactics that are short-term attainable goals that lead to the overall objective being met Repeat steps 1-5 until all desired actions are clearly determined (Business Management, 2011). My next and 2nd goal to make this project AIM successful is to conduct research on the demographic I believe we will gain the most revenue from Market target for sales multi lingual, college educated, ages 21-35. And using a mixed research analysis to gather the data. The 3rd goal is to increase in sales 20% within first year of production. As I said earlier SMART (SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible.) planning is the way I believe we will have the best chance to attain this goal, which I add, is an attainable goal. I also spoke briefly on preparing for a transition to a global marketing plan. This is a goal!! But it will take preparation, Time, analysis, and training, we do need to begin the preparations NOW, but the main goal is to market this new phone in the US. I talked about conducting a SWOT analyses Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. This will be to identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats internally and externally within Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. I spoke about conducting a competitive analysis to identify strengths of our competitors that we can learn from and improve on, and weaknesses that we may be able to take advantage of and get a bigger piece of this pie. We discussed Pricing, distribution, and promotional strategies using penetration pricing strategies, and how we would integrate traditional and digital promotional channels. And finely we discussed how we would measure the success of our new marketing plan to ensure we are meeting our goals, and what contingency plans we will develop incase our marketing plans aren’t working or we have an anomaly creep up that we could not plan for in advance. This project is the phone our target market wants, at the price our target market will spend to buy our phone, we have the promotional ads for the phone that will bring our target market to us, and the distribution abilities to get the phones to the consumer that is buying. I would like to say to all of you, that this is the beginning of a new era for Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. We are about to embark on the cutting-edge and best phone Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. has developed and marketed since the first couple models. I am so excited and confident to start this project, this project is going to INCREASE our customer base, INCREASE our profits, eventually INCREASE our brand globally and take Mobile Manufacturing, Inc. to the highest levels of our industry. Once again, I AM PROUD TO BE AN INTEGRAL PART OF THIS REBRANDING OF MOBILE MANUFACTURING INC. and would like to end with. We are all entering a new and exciting time at Mobile Manufacturing Inc. and I look forward to nothing but an ambitious, innovative, and profitable future for Mobile Manufacturing Inc. from this point going forward!!   Thank you