These end-of-chapter marketing plan exercises are designed to help you use what you learned in the chapter to build a strategic marketing plan for a company of your choosing. Once you've completed the marketing plan exercise for each chapter in Part 1 of this textbook, you can complete the Part 1 Marketing Planning Worksheet on your companion Web site at www.cengage.com/ marketing/lamb. Now continue building your strategic marketing plan that you started in Chapter 2 by completing the following exercises:
1. Describe how your company will handle privacy concerns.
2. Scan the marketing environment. Identify opportunities and threats to your chosen company in areas such as technology, the economy, the political and legal environment, and competition. Is your competition foreign, domestic, or both? Also identify opportunities and threats based on possible market targets, including social factors, demographic factors, and multicultural issues.
3. Complete your company's SWOT analysis by identifying opportunities and threats in the external marketing environment by performing environmental scanning:
a. List the demographic, ethnic, and social trends that could impact your firm, by investigating data from the U.S. Census Bureau at www.census.gov .
b. Determine which economic factors could influence the strategies of your firm by visiting the U.S. Economic and Statistics Administration at www.esa.doc.gov or the Bureau of Economic Analysis at www.bea. doc.gov .
c. Explore www.lawguru.com and report on at least three political and legal factors that could influence your marketing decisions.
d. Investigate the Web sites of federal government agencies that regulate your firm and industry and list at least six laws that regulate your business offering. The Federal Trade Commission is at www.ftc.gov. The Federal Communications Commission is at www.fcc.gov. The Food and Drug Administration is at www.fda.gov. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is at www.cpsc.gov. The Better Business Bureau is at www.bbb.org. The Internal Revenue Service is at www.irs.gov .
e. Identify your key competitors. A simple "yellow pages" listing of firms in the same business category can start your search. For online competitors, try www.bizrate.com.
f. Competition often comes from companies that are working on the same exact market as yours. That is especially true on the Internet. After you search for your direct competition, look for and think about what other companies are positioned to execute a similar business strategy for your target market. Determine if there are any players who might be able to develop technology more quickly or reach your target customers more effectively than you.