A paper that analyzes a publicly held company and its current strategic market plan. The prompt includes five different areas of analysis:

I. A statement of the organization’s purpose and general guidelines for accomplishing it (organizational mission). Some companies may call this their ‘vision statement’ but, either way, you will need to put this in quotation format when you cite the mission. If your company has a long mission statement (some companies can have several pages), then please paraphrase this section.

II. The organization’s skills, talents, and experiences, otherwise known as their distinctive competencies. As you have learned, most companies will have from 1-3 distinctive competencies (what they do best). Please state and analyze what these competencies are and provide some ‘support’ as to why you chose these as the competencies.

III. Trends or conditions that have enabled the company to reach a particular market (market opportunities). This section should analyze the current market trends (external marketplace) that is enabling and assisting the company in succeeding (or not succeeding depending on the trend). You should be very specific here regarding trends, such as economic conditions, consumer spending, political environments, etc.

IV. State the company’s organizational objectives and their accomplishments (or lack thereof). This analysis should include the areas of the marketplace in which the company has anticipated ‘succeeding’ in their objectives. Usually companies will ‘list’ these after their mission statement as they are the guiding principles to what the company hopes to achieve.

V. Discuss the brand. You have a choice here. You can either discuss the overall ‘parent’ brand (Procter and Gamble) or you can be more specific and write about specific brands and their strategies (Tide Detergent). Be sure to include as much of Knapps Model and David Olgivy’s concepts as possible in your analysis.