Helping Chen, Nathalie and Chris: Your Task

In your groups, write a marketing plan for Artspace. Your focus should be on thinking about these questions:

What does Artspace want to be?
Where is Artspace now?
Where is Artspace going?
How is Artspace going to get there?

Each group should spend three weeks [tutor to add dates here] discussing the kind of advice they would want to give to Chen, Nathalie, and Chris.

Each group should then write a marketing plan, saved as a Word or rtf document, and attach it to a posting in the group's discussion forum.

This is the proposed structure of the Artspace marketing plan:

(Executive) Summary	An overview and summary of the objectives and recommendations of the plan.
Introduction	A detailed description of the product and how it fits into the market. You should also include a statement about where the product is in the product life cycle.
Situation analysis	A description of where the organisation is now. It should include brief statements about: economic and business conditions for the product at this time the situation with respect to other relevant marketing environment factors, such as impending law changes that could affect the market, technology changes, and so on the competition - who they are and their strengths and weaknesses.
Target market(s)	A description of the target market(s) and the organisation's position with respect to those markets. You should also include an estimate of how many potential customers there are.
Goals and objectives	A statement of the broad marketing goals - market penetration, product development, market extension, or diversification - that the organisation hopes to achieve during the term of the plan, together with the specific sales or profit objectives that are set for each goal.
Strategies and tactics	Strategies are broad statements that state how each marketing goal will be addressed. Tactics detail how each objective is to be achieved in terms of the elements of the marketing mix.
Budget	A financial forecast of costs and sales over time.

There is no one right answer for this task. What is important is that, for decision you take, you explain why you think it is a wise marketing move considering the information you have.

Team members will have different ideas, but you need to agree on one approach and present this as the group's marketing plan. This will help you to develop negotiation skills online.

How will this work?

For each group, your tutor will appoint a chair and a presenter. The chair should keep the discussions on track and make sure the tasks are done in time. The presenter is responsible for the development of the output.

The final document should be compiled and shared with the rest of the group in your discussion forum a few days before the deadline. This will ensure that it represents the views and decisions of the team.

[tutor to list group names and roles here]

Group [..]
Chair: [name]
Presenter: [name]

[tutor to make sure each group has a separate discussion forum to complete this task]