Marketing Plan Assignment: Natural Evolution Business Strategy Analysis
Question
Task Description: Assessment 2 requires students to work individually on their selected new product or service (from assessment 1) to create a comprehensive strategic marketing plan. This is an individual assessment with a maximum word limit of 2500. Your assessment should be an application of relevant marketing concepts learnt in the unit. There is no need to go into details about explaining marketing concepts, rather it should be an applied discussion. Please upload the assessment through the appropriate Moodle link by week 10. Each assessment must be uploaded as a .doc or .docx file (word file).
Any assessment with a ‘Turnitin’ similarity score of more than 25% will be checked by the marker for plagiarism although it may not necessarily mean that you have plagiarised. If there is a substantial similarity score in the ‘Turnitin’ report, your assessment could be forwarded to an appropriate office/authority
Answer
Introduction:The Marketing Plan Assignment will discuss various aspects of Natural Evolution. It is an Australia based company. It provides banana flour, health supplements, cooking recipes and cosmetic products. The company was developed by Rob Watkins and Krista Watkins in the year 2006 (About Us, 2018). This Assignment on Marketing Planning will focus on e study and provide customer analysis, competitor analysis, SWOT analysis and stakeholder analysis. In the end, the study will be concluded by brief summary.
Discussion
a) Customer Analysis:This Marketing Plan Assignment determine key customers of the company as being mothers, young adults and homemakers. They demand ready made solutions such as banana flour, health supplements, beauty products and healing solutions. These customer segments are tech savvy. This helps the company to enhance its business aspects (Zioupou, Andreopoulou, Manos, & Kiomourtzi, 2014). However, as the company operates its business through e-commerce website, it targets the global customers. The targeted geographical segments of the company are Japan, UK, Europe, South Korea and Singapore.
b) Competitor Analysis
The Marketing Plan Assignment helps to identify impact of various macroeconomic factors on the business. In this context the competitor analysis of the company has been provided in lieu of political, economic, societal, technological, legal and environmental factors as discussed below.
Political: The government of Australia invests in profitable companies to enhance their business prospects. The government has invested around $1 million in the development of its Walkamin farm (Sturiale & Scuderi, 2016). This provided high degree of competitive advantages to the company.
Economic: The stable economic performance of world economy provides the global customers considerate degree of purchasing power (Bhaskaran, 2013). This develops the scope of the company to generate positive revenue from its business operations.
Societal: The fast-paced life of people encourages them to access ready-made products such as health supplements and beauty products. They also want to access all the products required for cooking and health solution from one website (Machfud & Kartiwi, 2013). As the company has become successful to meet these demands of the customer segments, this helps to enhance their competitive advantages.
Technological: As it operates the business in global platform, the company gets access to innovative technical solutions from various countries (Carlucci, De Gennaro, Roselli, & Seccia, 2014). This reduces cost of the business operations and helps the company to achieve economies of scale.
Legal: As the company operates in e-commerce business model, it has required to pay high taxes for exporting in various countries (Adapa, 2013). This reduces the degree of profitability. It negatively impacts the business operations of the company.
Environmental: This Marketing Plan Assignment has also determined the company owns its farm field, resulting in the business faceing a high degree of loses due to environmental hazards. In the year 2006, the cyclone devastated its production field (Shi, Xie, & Han, 2018). This negative environmental aspect has key potential to generate high loss in the business.
c) Other Stakeholder Analysis
The key stakeholders of the company are the customers and employees. The company has its own research and development solutions which check the safety of products. This helps the company to deliver high value to its customer segment. The organization also trains its employees to follow innovative methods if farming (About Us, 2018). This way it encourages its employees to provide necessary solutions to enhance the business prospect.
d) SWOT analysis
This Marketing Plan Assignment will utilize SWOT analysis the key strength, weakness, opportunity and threat of the business have been discussed as below.
Strength: The company owns its production fields. This helps the company to maintain the field effectively (About Us, 2018). Thus the company can ensure that key initiatives are taken to maintain better production.
Weakness: The company incurs high cost of production operated in Australia. Since the country faces various environmental impact (About Us, 2018). This negatively impacts the profitability of the business.
Opportunity: As it successfully operating in Japan, UK, South Korea and Europe, it has become successful to develop high degree of market potential in global platform (Daian, 2013). Thus the positive global exposure provides better opportunity for the company to enhance its business scope.
Threat: The product solutions such as banana flour can be easily produced (Chong, 2015). This creates a threat of competition and imitation for the company.
e) Problem and Opportunity Statement
The key problem for the company is that it has failed to protect the products from the threat of counterfeiting (About Us, 2018). Thus the low barriers of the entry can encourage small and medium firms to copy the business solution and create competitive threat.
The successful exposure in global market provides better opportunity to the company to enhance its business scope.
Conclusion
The discussed various aspects of marketing and operational activities of Natural Evolution. The study identified that the company operates an e-commerce business model to serve global customers. It has high degree of competitive advantages. But, legal and environmental factors are key drawback of the company. The SWOT performed on this Marketing Plan Assignment will help to identify the key problem and opportunity statement of the organization.
References
About Us. (2018, August 18). About Us. Retrieved from www.naturalevolutionfoods.com.au: https://www.naturalevolutionfoods.com.au/story/
Adapa, S. (2013). Electronic retailing of prepared food in Australia. In Research and development in e-business through service-oriented solutions, 280-292.
Bhaskaran, S. (2013). Structured case studies: Information communication technology adoption by small-to-medium food enterprises. British Food Journal, 425-447.
Carlucci, D., De Gennaro, B., Roselli, L., & Seccia, A. (2014). E-commerce retail of extra virgin olive oil: an hedonic analysis of Italian SMEs supply. British Food Journal, 1600-1617.
Chong, F. (2015). Stamping a firm footprint in China: Australia Post defines its future in e-commerce. Asia Today International, 7.
Daian, G. (2013). E-COMMERCE IN THE AGRIBUSINESSSECTOR: PRESENT SITUATION AND FUTURE TRENDS. Financial Engineering, E-commerce and Supply Chain, 213.
Machfud, A., & Kartiwi, M. (2013). E-commerce adoption by Indonesian small agribusiness: Reconsidering the innovation-decision process model. In Information and Communication Technology for the Muslim World (ICT4M), 2013 5th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE., 112-114.
Shi, Y., Xie, C., & Han, R. (2018). An Exploratory Study of Fresh Food E-Commerce in the UK and China. International Journal of Applied Logistics, 1-18.
Sturiale, L., & Scuderi, A. (2016). The digital economy: new e-business strategies for food Italian system. International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, 287-310.
Zioupou, S., Andreopoulou, Z., Manos, B., & Kiomourtzi, F. (2014). Business information systems (BIS) adoption in agri-food sector and the ‘transaction climate’determinant. International Journal of Business Information Systems, 65-83.
