Through Three Stages, A Path Becomes Clear

So through four weeks of working on this marketing plan and I think I've finally lined up the different parts in an orientation that makes sense. The highlights are still:

• Fundamental Entity - SADD (Students Against Drunk Driving)
• Core Competence - Education and Information dissemination to help young people deal with the dangers of substance abuse and other difficult situations
• Goal - To reduce the percentage of irresponsible drinking behaviors (mainly binge drinking) exhibited by college students by 30% in 5 years. The five years goal is to try to address the potential peer effects that could lead drinkers to drink irresponsibly.

See the pdf of the Value Proposition Worksheet for more details, the next step will be to work on the 4 P's of marketing - (Product, Price, Place, Promotion).

Product / Service - One of the key issues to look at here is whether I think SADD's campaign will be a product or a service, though right now I'm leaning to service (providing counseling and education). Still I am considering that SADD's educational materials and information could be a product, which the SADD chapters distribute. I'll need to think that one over before finalizing a point of view.

Price - Price seems straightforward in that SADD doesn't charge for being a member or receiving any counseling or help from them. There is a price based on time a person would spend interacting with SADD to receive the message or counseling, but this would be variable since a consumer could end the contact or consumption of the message at any time.

Place (Channel) - We have to identify communication distribution channels that are focused on college students. These channels will involve a limited number of intermediaries (short channel length), since SADD will want their message to be controlled and standardized across campuses and within campuses. The Channel Breadth will be minimal, as SADD will control the number of chapters on campuses and ensuring they are all promoting responsible drinking behaviors. SADD will likely not be upset if other groups are presenting the same message, but this would change if other groups were just passing on the same materials and information that SADD was using. The Channel Depth is somewhere in the middle, SADD will control what message and information the chapters should focus on, but will likely not tell them exactly how to promote it (it may offer ideas but not lock chapters to follow them specifically).

Promotion - SADD should try an awareness / informational campaign (inline with trying a Acquisition/ Stimulate Demand plan) using the informational side to focus on the benefits of responsible drinking behavior, while the awareness part is key to making sure that the consumers keep the plan's goal ("drink responsibly") fresh in their mind.

All right, back to working on the plan, hope to have a draft of my paper up by this time next week!

Core Competence and Goal

Now that I've settled on SADD working to minimize occurrences of binge drinking as the focus of my marketing plan, I've started to look at the core competence of SADD and what the goal for this program would be. Here are some thoughts in both areas...

Core Competence - After reading up on SADD on their website (http://www.sadd.org) I think that SADD's core competent lies in being able to Education and Information dissemination to help young people deal with the dangers of substance abuse and other difficult situations they may face. It became clear from reading SADD's mission and reviewing literature about them that, while they do some fundraising its clear their focus is on helping young people through educational efforts and programs. SADD leverages their competence by having chapters throughout the country in various educational institutions that are run by students. Students can identify with the pressures and temptations their peers face, and are best suited to help educate other students about the potential dangers and how to face difficult situations.

Goal - The goal of this program would be to reduce the amount of of college age students who partake in binge drinking behaviors by 50% in five years. The percentage will be measured through surveys of college age students, and while SADD could perform these surveys, it is likely that there are other organizations that could perform the surveys or at least partner with SADD on the surveys (e.g. the National Institute of Health, the CDC or some college education accreditation group?). The 50% reduction is an auspicious goal, but considering the detrimental effects of binge drinking in both the near and long term it is in line with SADD's mission and goals. The five year time frame may be a little short, but it would be the minimum acceptable, considering that in five years allows students who have just entered college to be fully exposed to SADD's program throughout their undergrad years (usually 4-5 years).

I'm spending the next few days working on the next part of the Big Picture for the marketing plan, the marketing objective and the source of volume.

Topic Selected!

So after some thinking and preliminary digging through the net, I've decided on SADD and Binge Drinking on College campuses as my topic for the marketing plan. I almost went with the American Cancer Society or a political campaign, but SADD presented some interesting concepts with regards to identifying the benefits of such a campaign.

My goal now is to nail down the first few steps of the marketing plan: Fundamental Entity, the core competence of the entity and the goal of the entity through the marketing campaign by Wednesday. The entity and goal seem to be a little more straightforward than goal right now, since I have to make sure the goal has measurable metrics, a time frame attached to them and thats its achievable.