It’s been a long journey getting to the end of the Marketing Plan assignment but it’s finally done! Looking back on the assignment, there were definitely bumps along the way but it was undoubtedly a rewarding experience.

Starting with Assignment One… 
It was a tough decision regarding which company we wanted to research. We did a process of elimination, first deciding the companies that we didn’t want to research and cutting down our list to a few companies that interested the whole team. We finally agreed on RIM, now known as Blackberry, to focus on for the rest of the semester. It was definitely a challenging experience researching Blackberry as it’s a company that is well known, but in the process of rebuilding and rebranding itself. Defining the Macro and Micro environment was the more self-explanatory section of the assignment as we knew how to go about researching and finding information. When it came to CDSTEP, there was more preparation required as this was a new topic that we were introduced to. We had to understand what the sections were asking for before we could actually begin our research. Our team worked through it together and all the team members were very willing to explain and help each other out. Assignment One definitely brought us closer as a team and we became more comfortable voicing our opinions to one another. When the marks for the assignment were released, our team was shocked at the low grade that we had received. The only comfort we found was that it was the class average, so that meant that at least we weren’t the only ones confused about what to do. We aimed to do better in the next section,

…which leads me to Assignment 2.
Wow, we did not understand this part of the marketing plan at all. When we were working on the demographics and target segments we thought we understood the concepts for sure. We identified demographics, geographics and psychographics – thinking that those were the segmentations. We then went on to identify what we thought to be segment variables such as age, gender, occupation, etc. What we failed to understand was that we actually had to create a specific target segment. Due to this mistake, we lost a lot of marks for our assignment two and had to revise most of our work to make sure that we had correct target segments for assignment three. This part of the assignment was definitely a learning experience for the whole group, going into this assignment thinking we knew was target segments were and coming out realizing that we had no idea and learning what target segments actually are. We did do the positioning part of the assignment right though, so that was a plus!

Last but not least, Assignment Three.
This part of the marketing plan was the most interesting and time consuming by far. It is definitely not like any other presentation I’ve done before and I’m glad that we got to experience video editing. Making the script and cutting down the information was not the difficult part of this assignment, it was more about deciding on how to send our message and what message we wanted to send. This, I believe, is an integral part of Marketing, so it was interesting to be able to experience the whole process. By reiterating the entire marketing plan assignment in this last section, we were able to review all the prior concepts learned in the semester – which was really helpful and was basically forcing us to review for the final (which is always good). All in all, the marketing video was a good experience – although the learning process and actual editing of the video took more than triple the amount of time it took to prepare and film the video.

The fact that I was going to be reviewed by my peers…
did not really have any effect on the effort I put into the project. I believe that you should always give your best effort into whatever you’re doing, no matter who is watching or judging you. With that being said, the amount of effort and the quality of work I produced during this assignment would have been the same regardless of whether or not I was being reviewed by my peers – doing your best all the time is what I believe in.

The Team.
I could not have asked for a better team to work with. They were encouraging, supportive and so easy to get along with. When we met as a group, it wasn’t only about getting the project done – it was friends getting together to talk and have fun. The best kind of groups are the ones that can be productive but at the same time have fun and actually get to know each other. My team was all of the above and they made sure that I was not alone when I was editing the video project (it’s hard to have more than one person on the computer). They were always there for moral support and made sure that everyone felt included and got assistance when they needed it. I can’t stop raving about how great my team was so I’ll just end it here. Very glad to have gotten to work on the Marketing Assignment with this team and the opportunity to get to know these people!