Marketing Strategies for Business Expansion

The provided document is an assignment that delves into the world of marketing, focusing on its role in business development and effective market planning. The report outlines key findings from various resources, including journal articles and online materials. It highlights the importance of integrated marketing communication (IMC) and its effects on consumer decision-making processes. Additionally, it touches on social media's impact on marketing public relations and the essentials of services marketing. The assignment aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of marketing strategies and their applications in business expansion.

MARKET
ESSENTIALS

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
PART 1............................................................................................................................................1
P1 Responsibilities of marketing officer and proposed structure of marketing department. .1
P2 Roles and responsibilities of marketing officer in wider context......................................4
PART 2............................................................................................................................................6
P3 Comparison of Your Destination and Nation express on the basis of 7Ps of marketing mix6
P4 Marketing plan for nation wide expansion........................................................................9
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................12
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................13
.......................................................................................................................................................13

INTRODUCTION
Marketing division has a role of expanding the business of organisation (Baines and
Page, 2013). Their duty is to perform different kind of activities to support the company in
increasing its revenue. “Your destination” is a new entrant in transportation industry, at present
they are running their operations in London and Essex and they have future plans of expanding
their current business in other parts of UK. This report will explain the major role of marketing
manager in the operations of the division. “Your destination” and National Express are compared
in given report. This comparison is support by 7Ps of marketing mix. Also a marketing plan is
made which is shown in this assignment, the main purpose behind all this analyses and plan is to
expand the “Your destination” business all over UK.
PART 1
P1 Responsibilities of marketing officer and proposed structure of marketing department
Marketing is the process of publicity of a commodity to increase its sales through
different mode of techniques and tools (Berkowitz, 2016). Marketing is a regular process
because one can't do stop marketing after promoting a product (Peter and Donnelly, 2011). So
for every launch of a new product, marketing is to be done. The main purpose of marketing is to
attract new customers and give them full satisfaction to convert these clients into loyal users
(Lipsman, Rich and Bruich, 2012). It plays the essential role by making link between production
and sale of the product. Without having the support of marketing, a production department can't
alone sale the product in a market. It creates the wants through different promotional techniques.
Therefore, some of the responsibilities of two new marketing officers are as follows:
 Market Research: It is the duty of new marketing officers to collect relevant
informations about the market related to its product and services (Malhotra, Birks and
Wills, 2013). Market Researcher has the responsibility to compare companies products
and services with competitor's product specially National Express.
 Planned expenses: A marketing officer is not only responsible for collecting relevant
informations but also he has to complete this task at minimum cost. So he has
responsibility to plan the future expenses in advance. He should be expert, in finding
different alternatives for promotions, so that minimisation of burden of excessive cost on
Your Destination can be reduced.
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 Brand Image: A marketing officer should not choose the way which can destroy the
companies image just for the sake of reducing the cost (Pike, 2015). Brand image is
composed of product price, quality and goodwill of the company (Blythe, 2012). It's his
duty to maintain positive brand image in the market.
 Expansion: The sign of successful campaign is improvement in sales and profits. It's the
responsibility of marketing officer to make such a campaign so that Your Destination can
expand its business in UK.
 Customer Service: Clients are the heart of Your Destination, because without customers
it can't attain its main objectives of expanding its business. So its the duty of Marketing
officer to ensure that existing customers should not face any difficulties.
 Make Advertisement Strategy: Promotion of products is essential for every company to
survive in this competitive world (Mihart, 2012). So Marketing officers are responsible to
make effective plans for advertisements. He should make strategies for good
advertisements.
Structure and operations of marketing department: Every organisational structure of
marketing department varies from company to company (Papasolomou and Melanthiou, 2012).
Marketing structure means interconnected nature of a market like number of buyers and sellers
and its relative strength (Dibb and Simkin, 2013). Where market structure of marketing
department refers to interconnected role of various persons having different roles and
responsibilities. Structure of marketing department is explained through diagram below:
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Source: Clickz/Marko Muellner
These persons do their marketing operations in following ways:
 Vice President: This person is in charge of entire marketing department. He involves in
planning and creating marketing strategy for Your Destination's products and services.
All other marketing employees have to report vice president.
 Marketing Officers: He has the responsibility of implementing the marketing strategies
which is made by Vice president. So he creates marketing messages, choosing
alternatives like website advertising, print adds and social media promotion. He also
carries out marketing campaigns and programmes to reach the target customers.
 Market Researchers: Your Destination employ market researchers to see the activities
of its competitors which is National Express. Their role is to find out information about
the target customers of Your Destination as well as National Express. Market
Researchers employ tools like surveys, statistics and publications (Silver, Stevens and
Loudon, 2012.). Information which is collected by market researchers is being used by
Market departments to submit the report to Vice president.
 Public Relations: Media is very crucial for promoting the company's product but it can
also prove to be dangerous in negative marketing of the companies brand image (Wirtz,
2012). Hence PR employees are the media spokesperson for Your Destination, they
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conduct interviews with media members. Public relation employees sometimes arrange
the meeting of CMO for press conference.
 Creative Services: This services are related to graphic and webs designers that involves
in portraying the companies image and brand tag to the public. A creative service team is
responsible for creating a brochure layout to design the message of Your Destination.
This message or tag-line is made by Vice president and Marketing Officers.
P2 Roles and responsibilities of marketing officer in wider context
Every business is facing challenges due to increased complexity in businesses. Marketing
department performs several duties like market research, making plans for promoting products
and services, implementing these plans etc (Durmaz, 2011). Your Destination have an objective
of expanding their business, they can achieve this goal only, when all employees departments
perform their duty in effective manner. Thus below some essential responsibilities of marketing
officers to maintain interrelation with other functional departments are given:
 Finance department: This functional department of Your Destination is responsible for
managing the financial resources of the firm in efficient manner. They make decisions
related to short and long term investment. The most important function of finance team is
to identify the optimum resources of finance which is available in the market (Jones and
Rowley, 2011). They assign budgets for Marketing, HR, Production and IT departments.
Under this budget every department has to give satisfactory results. They play a major
role in reducing total cost of business operations. So it is the duty of marketing manager
to provide necessary informations about marketing strategies and their outcomes of Your
Destinations sales to finance department. This practice will give convenience to finance
team to measure the profitability and returns from specific strategies. As finance
department works on future forecasting of sales and costs, thus this strategy will help
them to arrangement of funds from different sources in advance.
 Human resource division: HR team indulge in recruiting process to select new talents
for Your Destination. They also involves themselves in resolving the conflict between
employees and different departments. Here Marketing officer helps HR team in selecting
right people for marketing department. He can give the list of skills and requirements
which is essential in new candidate. This list gives guidelines to HR in making the set of
questions which he has to asked from applicant. As marketing officers has sound
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information about the people who are working in transportation companies, so they are
responsible to refer talented employees to HR department. HR and Marketing department
doesn't have any direct link but they can help each other in achieving the long term goals
of the organisation.
 Purchase department: This department is responsible for buying vehicles and essential
goods, necessary for smoothly running of the business operations. Therefore purchase
department has a separate procurement employees who plays the role of finding different
sources and suppliers from which company can place the purchase orders. They pass
tenders for Your Destination and selects the more suitable one. Marketing Officers
through their research work helps production department in suggesting the right source
for placing the order. These officers regularly watch the activities of National Express
like what new technologies they are implementing, what future plans they are making,
etc. This valuable informations later share with production department which helps them
in critical thinking and gives them right direction to select the proper suppliers of
vehicles. Hence, without the support of Marketing officers, procurement team can't
accomplish their work in proper directions.
 Operational Department: This department plays a major role in deciding in advance
about success and failure of Your Destination. They are responsible for running vehicles
at the right time, providing better services to the customers and proper clients feedback.
Thus it is the duty of Marketing Officer, to convey the customers feedback and their
opinions about Your Destination to operational team. This feedback will help operational
team in eliminating the mistakes and improve the operations of the company in future.
Your Destination is planning to enter in various other cities, therefore its the duty of
operational department to make the customers to give positive response for their services.
Marketing officers are aware of future threats and challenges, so its their responsibility to
alert the operational team about these challenges and problems. This useful information
will help operations team to work accordingly and serve customers with better facilities.
Marketing officers can also support operational wings by communicate them about
working styles of various competitors which can help Yours Destination operational
people to make positive changes accordingly.
Memo for circulation before the next senior management meeting
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MEMORANDUM
To: Senior Management of Yours Destination
From: Marketing Manager Yours Destination
Date: 6th November, 2017
Subject: Expansion in UK
Respected Senior Managers,
Here at Your Destination, we're so excited to have you all on the board and we are praise on this
new strategy. Since we're going to expand our business in various cities of UK like Manchester,
Newcastle, Glasgow and Aberdeen to become nationwide company, I wanted to give everyone
over at recommended roles and responsibilities for new Marketing officers. I have analysed and
searched various gaps to be filled by Marketing officers to expand our business. I've explained
all roles and responsibilities in my report and also putted various links which Marketing officers
has to made with various functional departments. I'm very excited about the strategy to expand
as its a new challenge for us.
Best,
Marketing Manager
PART 2
P3 Comparison of Your Destination and Nation express on the basis of 7Ps of marketing mix
Marketing mix is a tool which supports managers through brand offerings (Lamb, Hair
and McDaniel, 2011). Below is 7Ps of marketing mix for Your Destination and National
Express:
Basis Your Destination National Express
Product Your destination focused on quality of
their services. Their transportation
vehicles are costly because of all latest
This enterprise mainly target normal
category customers. Their operation is
huge and thus increases the chances of
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features and comfort in it. This
organisation has successful operational
team which works behind the right
timing of the vehicles, so customers
rarely faces the problem of
inconvenience. They provide luxury
facilities because their main target is
rich and upper class people. They try to
improve condition services to the
customers instead of increasing no of
transportation vehicles.
delay in reaching to the customers. Your
Destination operates only one product
which is transportation vehicles but
National Express runs trains, trams and
buses. Their vehicles are in descent
conditions but still missed latest features
like WIFI, toilet and entertainment in it.
Price As Yours Destination targets only rich
and levy customers, its price is higher
than its competitors. The another
reason for its high price is service.
Your Destination provides excellent
services and the customers can reach
their destiny faster than National
Express. But still Yours Destination
gives competition to National Express
by charging low price benefits in their
various offers. Their target is to capture
premium segment as lower segment is
already covered by National Express.
Their strategy of charging high price
fulfils this objectives. Your Destination
also adopt the strategy of skimming
price.
In case of National Express, it charges
economic price from its customers. They
give opportunities to every class of
people to experience their services.
National Express main aim is to cover
more people with their services. So
charging high price can divert them from
their aim. They always follows neutral
pricing strategy to cover more people.
Place They don't have offices in backward
locations. They only targets to have
National Express have their offices at
various place as their target is to cover
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offices in prime areas of the city. That's
why they don't have stoppages between
one destinations to another. Your
Destination usually accepts booking
through online mode for which they
have set large offices.
maximum people. They have many
stoppages because they don't any people
left without their services. Travels can
conveniently book tickets from their
multiple locations. National Express has
set small offices and online facilities for
booking the ticket for their customers.
Promotion Your Destination spend lots of fund on
their promotional activities, social
media advertisement, digital marketing
and lots of other activities. They are
maintaining separate team for Public
relations with media. These PR
managers provides attractive seasonal
offers to their permanent, loyal and
premium class customers. Your
Destination is also promoting their
brand on National Television's but they
are not spending much on this media.
National Express is still using old way of
promotion. They gives advertisements in
newspapers, printing pamphlets, etc.
They are not focusing on taking any kind
of burden on their cost due to expensive
promotional activities. But they are
active on mobile applications
promotions.
Physical
Evidence
Your Destination is currently operated
in London and Essex. They have good
brand image in these 2 cities. Rich
people gives first priority to this
company while travelling because its
saves their time and usually they are
out of rush here. Customers are
impressed with Your destinations
luxurious and levy services.
National Express is famous for its
affordable price. So people usually
belongs from normal background,
prefers to travel with National express
due to its manageable prices.
People People are the major factors for which
all strategies are made and fund has
National Express select the people
through standard criteria of selection.
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invested by Your destination. Without
people there is no mean for all types of
luxurious services. Thus company
prefers recruiting those candidates, who
are passionate for work and accepts
challenges to accomplish their target
before deadline. They don't target to
hire experts but they like the persons
who enjoys their work.
This selection criteria is set by
government authorities. They only
preferred trained and skilled employees
who has proper understanding of
organisational culture. National Express
only selects those candidates who work
according to system set by government.
Process Your Destination uses latest technology
, so their process is in well mannered
and clear. They offers discount to
online payers and their vehicles have
latest features. Your Destination still
needs modification in their online ticket
booking process due to bugs in their
sites. It has tracking device in
transportation vehicles which help the
customers to track and finding the
exact locations of the bus. It is highly
adoptable to latest technologies.
National Express still facing the
challenge of rigid process which
sometimes affect the operations by not
able to provide service on time. It has to
improve their process by adopting latest
technologies, so that it can give their
customers an ease of services.
P4 Marketing plan for nation wide expansion
Marketing plans are usually a blueprint of all activities related to the advertisement and
marketing efforts (Lancaster and Massingham, 2010), they supports a company in achieving their
aims and objectives by using alternatives of resources in effective manner. Thus marketing plans
for Your Destination is given below:
Mission of the company: To provide levy services of transportation with premium quality to its
customers. Innovation and sustainable techniques of working are its main preference.
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Marketing Objectives: To increase the popularity of companies brand which is Your
Destination in new areas where organisation has a plan to expand.
Basic Objectives: To support company in expansion of business and improve the customers
satisfaction level in services.
Business Aim: Your destination has two prime targets:
 Increase revenue by 25% in next 3 years
 Reduce the number of delay services by 30%
Situational Analysis – SWOT analyses of Your Destination
Strength
Your Destination has trained staff and have
much higher productivity compare to other
competitor companies. It is using latest
technology to reduce the overall cost of
operations of the business. It has captured large
share in premium market in short period
because it only targets rich people. Its brand
value is increasing continuously.
Weakness
Its services are very much expensive compared
to other companies. Large no. of customers are
not using Your Destination services because it
is very costly. Its financial position is not good
because of the decreasing in its liquid assets
regularly.
Opportunities
Your destination can open new offices in
several backward areas which can help the
company in targeting below premium
customers without affecting its fixed assets. It
can invest more on buying new transportation
vehicles to improve their time of delivering of
services. It can utilise various other alternatives
to reduce the overall cost of operations. It can
consider economic class clients as their
customers and can avail services to them at
economic price.
Threats
Transportation industry is rapidly growing, so
this can prove to be a prime reason behind
entry of new entrants. Increase cost of fuel and
the effect of BREXIT can bring new challenges
in transportation industry. Company has a
threat of low demand which can impact Your
Destination in a wrong way through collapsing
its business.
PESTLE Analysis of Your Destination
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Source= petanalysis.png
 Political – Political environment of UK is constant and firm. For example London
Heathrow Airport has recorded most international passengers landed in 2007. The red
double-decker bus is also a preferred most in London. Hence Your Destination is getting
big opportunity to grow its business.
 Economic: Seasonality is another issue faced by Your Destination because people
usually preferred to travel during holidays. This preference creates variations in the
operations of Your Destination. So, the company has to spend more to continue their
operations.
 Social: Your Destination can be affected by green issues because people who are focused
on carbon footprint may refuse to travel through transport vehicles to reduce the emission
of CO2.
 Technological: Online booking is now in trend to book the tickets from convenient
place. Thus Your Destination is getting technological advantage as it implements latest
technologies in its services.
 Environmental: Gracefully environment of Your Destination is attractive as it provides
its clients the latest features in vehicles. Also environment of UK is pretty clean which
encourage customers to travel in Your Destination buses.
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BCG Matrix of Your Destination
Questions Marks
Low Market share
and
High Market Growth
Don't know what to do with opportunities
decide whether to increase investment or not
Stars
High Market share
and
High market growth
Doing well, great opportunities.
Dogs
Low market share
and
Low Market growth
Weak in market, difficult to make profit.
Cash Cows
High market share
and
Low market growth
Doing well in no growth market with
limited opportunities
Low Market Share High
Hence in the above BCG matrix Your Destination lies under Question mark and National
Express lies under the category of Cash Cows.
Main Competitor: National Express is the main competitor, as currently they hold large amount
of shares in the market and their revenue is much higher than Your Destination.
Target Market Segmentation: At present the services provided by Your Destination is largely
preferred by MNCs because they are ready to expend more to get better and fast services. Tactics
by which Your destination can improve sales are as follows: Market Development: In this tactic, Your Destination can buy or acquire small companies
which are in transportation industry. This can give advantage to Your destination in
increasing the number of customers in short span of time.
 Market Penetration: Your Destination can adopt cost effective strategy through giving
discount on their tickets. It can give heavy discount to their new customers and give them
opportunities to add more points by referring it to their friends and relatives. This tactics
will increase its popularity and can capture large amount of market shares.
Budget:£ 700000 will be the total budget for the expansion plan. 70% will be utilised in digital
marketing and discount strategies.
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Low
High
Mar
ket
gro
wth

CONCLUSION
On the basis of above reports and all findings and analysis, it can be concluded that the
role of marketing manager is important. They are responsible for business development.
Marketing department has to make good relation with other functional departments like finance,
HR, IT and Production to make the operations of the business effective. Effective market plan is
good in minimising the wastage of resources. Marketing strategies shows the one path on which
every functional department has to move together.
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Online
Marketing essentials, 2017. [Online]. Available through<https://mktgessentials.com/>.
[Accessed on 6th November, 2017].
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